Looking Glass
by La Guera
Summary: He had thought he was doing a kindness by keeping his assignment from her. Now he knows better, but the knowledge may have come too late.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **We're back on the crack AU wagon again. There are five parts to this story, and they are complete. Here there be spoilers for S1 and S2. Consider yourself warned.

The expression on her face in that moment was one he would remember for the rest of his life. There were others that time had imprinted on his memory. The shrewd curiosity with which she'd regarded him as she sprawled on the pavement of 34th Street with her skirt bunched under her ass. The fond softness of her face when affection had deepened to love. The pop-eyed, open-mouthed surprise when he'd pushed into her one sticky August night. The triumphant exhaustion of a July morning five years later, when she'd lain in a hospital bed with blood on her thighs and his son on her heaving stomach. But none were as absolutely clear as the one she wore right now. It was the expression of a woman who was going, going gone.

His first instinct was to bolt from the table and rush outside, and his calves twitched in anticipation of the movement, but Delgado's hand was on his wrist, and the phantom heft his badge was an iron anchor at his hip. If he left the table now, he risked blowing the whole operation and letting half a dozen perverts and pedophiles walk to hurt more kids. Not to mention the risk of getting them both killed.

He stared at his wife through the thick glass of the restaurant window, and his heart cramped painfully in his throat. Her lips were parted in surprise, and her eyes were round and clouded with disbelieving anguish. _What the fuck are you doing?_ her eyes asked, and as he watched, she ran her fingers through her hair.

He knew damn well what she _thought_ he was doing. Any sane woman would have jumped to the same conclusion had they seen their husband sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant with another woman. No doubt she thought he was wooing the woman across the table in preparation for a super, extramarital fuck. It was written all over her bloodless, pinched face and the white-knuckled grip of her fingers on the armrests of her chair.

_You shoulda told her, _his father grunted with dour triumph. _If you'da told her, this wouldn't be happenin' now. She'd know that you were workin' undercover with a female partner to bust a child prostitution ring sellin' six-year-olds to rich perverts who liked their fields to have no grass or hills. She'd understand that this was strictly business and not pleasure, and she wouldn't look like she was bleedin' to death on the pavement._

_But naw, you had to go play Rambo and decide she'd be better off in the dark. You told yourself you didn't want her worryin' about you while you were crawlin' with the rats in the sewer, that she had enough to worry about takin' care of Junior. So you kept your mouth shut and just told her that you were workin' a case that required you to be away from home for a few days. The wistfulness in her eyes at that news twisted your heart, but she soldiered up and told you she loved you, and in the mornin', she met you at the door and handed you the toiletry kit you'd forgotten to pack. She was the dutiful police officer's wife._

_Now she's standin' out there, watchin' her world fall down, and God knows what she's thinkin'. You were her first-not just her first fuck, but her first everythin'. Her first fuckin' love. She was so shy about givin' herself to you. Her hands used to tremble every time she touched you, light as dust against your skin, and she still cries sometimes when the lovin' has been good. She exposed herself a little at a time, let you see all her insecurities and scars, and it took years for her to believe that Alan Funt wasn't hidin' in the bushes somewhere, waitin' to tell her that the fairy tale she was livin' wasn't a goddamn joke._

_Well, fuck if it ain't over now._

His legs twitched again, and Delgado tightened her grip on his wrist.

"Don't, dammit," she hissed through gritted teeth. "Keep your cool."

_Fuck you, _he wanted to shout. _Fuck you. That's my wife out there. My beautiful, loyal, sweet fuckin' wife. She's done everything I ever asked of her and then some. She's given me a home and a son and stood by me through months of shit no wife should ever have to endure. She deserves to know that my heart is still hers and always will be. She deserves better than to be left on the frozen fuckin' sidewalk, watchin' her worst goddamn nightmare._

"Think about the case. We're almost home. Don't blow it now," Delgado whispered frantically.

_Fuck the case. _But his mind's eye filled with the images the DA had brought him a few weeks ago. Little girls barely out of training pants who knew far too much about what grown men had in theirs, and little boys with open legs and closed faces. He remembered the horribly vacant eyes and the distant stares and the way his stomach had rolled with each new, glossy photo. It had made him unclean, defiled him, and even the scalding water of the precinct showers couldn't rid him of the taint. He'd promised those unnamed children that he'd bring down the dirty bastards who'd ruined their childhoods, and he'd never gone back on his word.

_Yeah? Well, you just did. You promised her when you married her that you'd never hurt her, never break her heart. You swore that you would love, honor, and protect her until your dyin' day, and you failed spectacularly. You did what thirty years of life with wheels under her ass couldn't: you broke your adamant angel._

Rebecca gazed at him in mute entreaty. _Come. Tell me this isn't true._

_Oh, my doll, I want to so bad, _he thought, but before he could push his chair back, the children were imploring him, petting him with small, grimy hands and beseeching him with tired, tear-stained faces. He forced his legs to relax.

Rebecca's face, a pale moon in the window. _Please. Make this unreal._

_I am so, so sorry, doll, but I have to finish what I started. I love you so much, and my Junior. I love you. Please forgive me. Once I finish this job, I'll never go under again. Never. It's not worth it. I have to hurt you now. Just this once._

He willed his fingers to twine with Delgado's. "You're absolutely right, pumpkin," his numb lips said. "A night out was just what we needed." He kissed her knuckles, and his mouth tasted of gall.

Rebecca crumpled. One minute, she was upright, and the next, she was doubled over in her chair, hands clamped to her bony knees. He braced himself for the sight of vomit splattering onto the pavement in a steaming clot, but it never happened. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and he sensed rather than heard the sound she made, a low, strangled _hunh hunh hunh, _as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

He waited for the wracking sobs and the screaming hysteria, and his vivid imagination helpfully supplied images of her storming into the restaurant and attempting to neuter him with the salad fork, but none of those things happened. Instead, she slowly heaved herself upright again, a puppet in the hands of a precocious but inept child. Her face was wooden and inscrutable, and her eyes were painted into their blanched sockets, as dead as the eyes of the children he was trying so desperately to save. Her lips twitched, and she grimaced as if she had swallowed something rotten and bitter, and he was sure that she was working herself up to curse him with the choicest of the invective at her command, but she only smiled at him, a tortured, terrible rictus that made his blood run cold. It was the smile of a corpse that had not yet surrendered to the reality of its demise.

_A Death's Head _smile, he thought nonsensically, and shuddered.

She backed away from the window with that terrible, dead smile still on her face, and he was convinced that she was simply going to roll herself into oncoming traffic and the path of a speeding taxi. Grille would kiss spoke with the spanging, crunching twang of crumpled metal and twisted axle, and then his girl, who had never learned to fly, would spread her arms and soar over the asphalt in defiance of God until gravity slipped cold, cruel fingers around her bony ankles and dragged her back to earth. She would leave the world in a flash of gold and a gaudy splash of red.

_Won't that be fun? When he gets older, you can tell Junior all about the day you ran into the street and scooped his mother's brains off the road like gelato. You can tell him that when you tried to cradle her shattered head and tell her how sorry you were, pieces of her skull kept falling off into your hands. I'm sure he'd like to know that her blood was sticky as corn syrup on your hands, and that it turned her blonde hair a deep, wet red. That'll be a good one for show-and-tell. And hey, as a special bonus for being such a good boy, you can tell him how your and Mommy's friend, Dr. Hawkes, stuffed her broken head with paper and mortician's putty._

Suddenly, he no longer cared about his cover or mournful children in too few clothes. He just wanted to be sure his girl didn't go away and leave him and Junior with no one to dry their tears. He dropped his fork and was halfway out of his chair, shaking loose of Delgado's grip with a blind, savage jerk.

"Re-,"

Just before her rear wheels would have left the steep curb and plunged her into Midtown traffic, she pivoted sharply to the right with a disjointed, mechanical snap of her arms. One last, baleful look, and then she was rolling past the window and his field of vision. He watched her until she was out of sight, heedless of Delgado's increasingly firm tugs on his wrist. Her hair was last to disappear; it faded slowly into the distance, the last ray of sunlight swallowed whole by an approaching storm.

"Darling, are you all right?" Someone was talking to him, and he turned his head from the window to see who it could be and how they could possibly matter now that the sun had gone out. There was a woman seated across from him, and for a heartbeat, he didn't recognize her. Then, she hissed, "Dammit, _dear, _you're making a scene," and the penny dropped. Delgado. He sank into his chair again.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" she asked brightly, but her face was hard and furious. _You're blowin' it, asshole._

"Mmm?" he muttered vaguely. "Yeah, I'm good, honeycakes. I just thought that girl in the wheelchair was gonna roll into traffic an' get hurt, is all. She shouldn't be out alone." The words were stilted and poisonous in his mouth, belladonna Novocain, and he hid his grimace in a sip of flat champagne.

_Traitor!_ his mind shrieked at him, and his tongue needled and burned as if he'd swallowed a mouthful of turpentine. _Drive another nail in, why don't you? Insinuate your genius wife is a fuckin' droolin' retard who doesn't know her own goddamned mind. Never mind that she's thirty times smarter than you'll ever be. Go ahead and tell Delgado there that she's a lousy lay, too. Why not? Since you're diggin' your own grave with the soup spoon, why don't you go for broke and fuck Delgado in the handicapped stall? Wouldn't want somebody else to get your first-class ticket to Hell._

"You're so thoughtful, honey," Delgado cooed, and reached for his hand.

He flinched and extricated his hand. He might be able to speak with a forked tongue, but that was a treachery he could no longer abide. He ate his soup with his hand balled into a bloodless fist and kept in there no matter how many significant looks Delgado lobbed him over her salad greens.

The color bled from his world after that. It happened gradually. He first noticed it when the waiter brought their entrees. His starched, white shirt had dulled to a drab grey, and his black bowtie was the color of old slate. Nor was he the only one. Across from him, Delgado's rich, caramel skin was the diseased, papery grey of the dead. The alleged ringleader of the Pervert Mafia had entered the establishment resplendent in a maroon suit, and now it was colorless and ugly.

"Your salmon, sir," the monochrome waiter said with grey lips, and set down a platter of well-dressed newsprint.

His stomach rolled, but he picked up his fork in limp, cold fingers.

"Ooh, that looks lovely, dear," the ghostly Delgado said, and he smothered a bark of nauseated laughter.

Two colors, however, did not fade. They stood out in bright relief in his new, black-and-white world, and they struck him with the force of premonition. Red and gold winked at him from every direction. The handkerchief tucked neatly into the waiter's vest reminded him of a strangely prim gunshot wound, and Delgado looked like a scream queen at the end of the night in her red dress and matching heels, and the succulent cherry tomatoes in her entrée salad made it look like she was eating blood and dirt. As he watched, she took a prodigious forkful of salad and shoved it into her mouth.

_Enjoyin' that dirt, are ya? _he thought maniacally, and almost tittered.

And there was gold. Until now, he had never realized how much gold there was in any given room. Now, it was everywhere he turned. Gold in the necklace that Delgado wore around her neck and in the fake wedding band she wore on the third finger of her left hand. Gold in the buttons on the alleged ringleader's buttons and on each of his five fat fingers. Gold in the elegant sconces that adorned the walls.

And gold on the third finger of his left hand. There brightest of all. It was a gleaming spark in the dullness of the room. It had always shone with its own light, even in the somber darkness of St. Patrick's Cathedral on his wedding day. Especially then.

_You couldn't stop lookin' at it there on the velvet pillow. Sure, the ring had sparkled in the store display case, but you hadn't expected any less. Those stores probably hired people just to clean the jewels and spiff 'em up to draw customers. But it was still glowin' that mornin' with no display lights to blame it on, and you were mesmerized._

_You still remember the contrast it made with Rebecca's pale, spidery fingers as she slipped it onto your hand, sunlight and ivory. It was beautiful. When you were a kid, your ma always talked about the sacred and the profane. Life was sacred, she said, and hope, and love, and givin' yourself to another person. You wanted to believe her, so you did._

_Then you grew up and saw all the terrible things people do to each other. You saw the consequences of unchecked lust and greed and hate. You fished bodies outta dumpsters and rivers that had been put there for twenty bucks and a pair of shoes, and it was impossible to believe that anything was sacred or ever had been. The last sacred thing in your life had been Diana, and she was in the ground with no one to mourn her but you. If the sacred had existed in the world, it had retreated to the earth with her and left nothin' but the profane behind, and that it had left behind in spades._

_But standin' at the altar with Rebecca in your arms and that hunk'a gold on your finger, you believed it the sacred again. She was holy-what the two of you made together was holy-and you were reminded of it every time the light caught the rings on your fingers. It was always on the periphery of your vision while you spun her around the dance floor like a china doll, and it was exquisite against the dainty, white satin of her panties and the delicate lace of her stockings._

_Rebecca must have sensed it, too, because she held her ring up and examined it for a moment in the moonlight that streamed through the bedroom window of the apartment._

Look at that, _she murmured, and laughed, a relaxed, easy chuckle. _Love magic, _she whispered._

_Her breath was warm against your cheek, and you thought she was joking, and anyway, your hands were busy fumblin' with the clasp of her bra. But knowin' what you know now about who and what she is, you wonder if she wasn't serious. You kept track of your ring all night, watched it trace blazing patterns over her skin, and you savored the way she shuddered when cold metal met the wet, warm flesh between her legs. That ring was proof of the sacred, and you tainted it. You fuckin' _profaned _it._

_I didn't do anything, _he protested indignantly, and suddenly he was sixteen years old again and trying to explain to his father how it was that one of his children was lying at the bottom of the stairs in a house they'd been forbidden to enter. _I didn't mean it, Pop. I thought she was right behind me. I didn't-_

_It doesn't matter what you did or didn't do. It only matters what she saw, what she believes. Belief gives magic its power, and what's love but a kind'a magic? Love lives or dies by belief. Your sister should have taught you that much. Her death was preordained from the minute she believed you hated her. You saw the light flicker and die in her eyes, smothered by the conviction that you really wished she'd never been born, and it never came back, no matter how much you tried to rekindle it. She died less than a year later, just up and stepped off the landing and into the heart of that rotten house._

_Oh, she told you that the house took her, that it asked her to choose which of you it would have, but in your heart, you suspect that she took that freefall to escape the knowledge that for a second-just one, single second-you hated her. She had lost her belief, her love, and a person who believes in nothing cannot survive. So she closed her eyes and winked out, a star gone to supernova._

_How long until the wedding band winks out, fades to dull, tarnished copper on your hand? Will you wake up in the morning and find it's lost its luster, or will it take longer? Days? Weeks? Months? Maybe it'll slough its shine every time you think of her and ache, or maybe it's tied to her lifeforce. Maybe it'll go on shinin' until she works up enough courage or hatred to suck on the end of your spare service pistol, and maybe it'll pop and sizzle like a blown bulb when her brains hit the walls and ceiling in a messy, red spray._

He realized that Delgado's lips were moving.

"-the move," she said.

"Hmm?"

"They're on the move," she repeated.

Sure enough, the alleged ringleader of the Pervert Mafia and his cronies were pushing their chairs back from the table and rising, slipping into coats and mufflers and shouting to overcome the stubborn deafness of the drunk. In the monochromatic grey of Flack's vision, the ringleader was a wattled, waddling elephant, and he watched his tootling, trumpeting departure with dazed amusement.

He and Delgado followed suit a few minutes later, trailing the noisy gaggle at a discreet distance. The air was stinging and cold against his cheeks, and ice crunched beneath his feet like bits of bone. The world was still grey, and the newsstand bled into the façade of a neighboring bodega. Even the people were indistinguishable lumps milling and jostling around him, ghosts with no faces and no purpose. Occasionally, a flash of red or gold would catch his eye, and he would stop, convinced that Rebecca had come back to offer him a second chance, but it was never her. It was a haughty Manhattan socialite or a poodle crammed unceremoniously into a red sweater vest. Those looked like walking blood clots, and he watched them scamper past with dull fascination.

Delgado tried to thread her arm through his as they walked, and he stiffened and pulled away from her. "No. You're not my wife," he said matter-of-factly.

She rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the newsflash, Flack," she muttered. "It's called pretending. Now let's go. Get with the program." She reached for his arm with her mittened hands.

"No," he snapped, and several heads swiveled in his direction.

Delgado rounded on him. "Goddammit, what the hell is the matter with you?" she demanded in exasperation. "You've been off-script since the appetizers. Are you fuckin' tryin' to get us made, you stupid prick?"

He stuffed his gloved hands into the pocket of his leather overcoat and studied a smashed cigarette butt a few paces ahead of him on the pavement. "You remember that woman outside the window of the restaurant?"

Delgado pursed her lips. "The one in the wheelchair? The one you thought was goin' to roll into traffic?"

He nodded once. "She was my wife."

Delgado shrugged. "So?" Then as the wheels began to turn and click inside her mind, "Oh. You didn't tell her you were goin' under?" She rummaged in her handbag for the crumpled pack of cigarettes she kept there.

_Goin' under. _He snorted. What an innocuous, misleading phrase that was. It implied that you could come up for air anytime you wanted, like the game he and Diana had played when they were kids, the one where they'd bet ice cream on who could hold their breath the longest.

_I guess she won that one, _sneered a wry voice inside his head. _She's been holdin' hers for fifteen years and countin'. Beat that._

Except this was nothing like the game he had once played with his sister at the public pool. That had been a bit of fierce competition and harmless fun between two halves of the same whole, and it had not been for keepsies, as Diana would have said. The worst that could go wrong in that game had been a mouthful of heavily-chlorinated pool water and a few hours of sisterly crowing.

But this version of the game was terrible. It was very much for keepsies, and there was no coming up for air until one of them was either dead or in handcuffs. There were no take-backs or timeouts to make things right. He could either walk away and let Delgado die and fourteen children be sold into the sex trade, or he could stand here on this shitty, frozen sidewalk and let his wife think he was fucking around on her, let her bleed her love magic through clutching, disbelieving fingers.

_Life's not fair, _he thought miserably. _Not fair not fair not fair._

"Naw," he said at last. "I thought it'd be easier on her, you know? I mean, she's already got her hands full takin' care of my baby, and I didn't want her worryin'. 'Sides, the DA cocksucker assured me it'd be a quick job."

_Two, three days, tops. That's how he sold you on this job. Just forty-eight hours, and you'll be back with your own family. We've already got mountains of circumstantial evidence and a statement from a jailhouse snitch; we just need corroborative evidence. In and out._ _Then he tossed that dossier_ _of stomach-heavin' pictures onto your desk, and you were hooked. You could never turn down a hunt once you saw the victims, and that smug bastard knew it. So you agreed to team up with Delgado and tail the fat shit alleged ringleader to see what you could see._

_Then word came down that the prosecution's star witness, a ten-year-old boy who'd been flashing his undeveloped johnson at webcams since he was four walked in front of a Coke truck makin' deliveries on the lower East Side. Mac and the rest of the Nerd Squad are still tryin' to figure out if it was an honest accident, or if the kid just decided to punch his own ticket rather than pose for that lidless eye one more time. Hell, you wouldn't blame him if he did, mortal sin or not. You remember how hard it was to do it just that one time, after your sister died and they'd wanted to be sure you weren't hidin' a dirty little secret. _

_You were sixteen, old enough to understand what was happening, and there was nothin' inappropriate in the way the forensic photographer looked at you while he scuttled around you, snapping pictures, but you still felt dirty and violated. You felt like throwin' up the whole time, and on the way home-_

He pushed those thoughts away. He refused to go there again. Not ever.

_Fine, _the voice said reasonably. _We won't go there. We'll talk about the fact that your forty-eight-hour easy job has turned into six days of following this asshole around and sleepin' in the rack room at the station house and in shitty hotel rooms with Delgado in the other bed. You lie awake and smell the stale farts in the dirty bedsheets, and you wish like hell you were with your girl. But you roll over, and there's just Delgado, sleepin' in her clothes and the sound of some hooker bangin' a john in the room next door._

_What you wish for most is Junior. You want to hear the little noises he makes when he's playin' with his fingers or toes in his crib or in the bouncer Rebecca set up in the livin' room so he could be with his parents in the evenin's. He don't really bounce in it yet-he's only three months old, and his limbs still have a mind of their own-but he lies there in the sling seat with his fist crammed happily into his toothless, gummy mouth and looks at you. You can reach over and tickle his twitchy feet or stroke his drool-covered fingers while you watch the Rangers on TV, and sometime between seven and eight o'clock, Rebecca brings you his bedtime bottle. You lift him onto your lap and offer him the rubber nipple, and then you relax to the sounds of him pigging out and the soft kneading of his small feet on your forearm._

_It's the peaceful rhythm of your life that's been shattered by those stark photos of children in adult poses. The last time you saw Junior was six days ago goin' on seven, when you were blowin' raspberries on his belly to watch his legs kick. The last time you heard him was three nights ago, when Rebecca held him up to the phone so he could hear your voice. He squealed into the phone. Maybe it was just gas-probably-but you like to think it was 'cause he recognized his old man. Hearin' him made your heart ache, and you were countin' down the hours until you saw 'em again._

_Now you might be goin' home to an empty apartment._

_I'm drownin', _he thought. _Oh, God, I'm drownin'._

Delgado lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply. "Shit, Flack, I'm sorry." The words emerged on a cloud of smoke. "I really am, but you gotta pull your shit together, or we're both gonna come outta this in bags."

"I'm not touchin' you anymore. I can't." He shrugged.

"Christ, Flack, I'm not dyin' for your wife's trust issues."

"Go fuck yourself," he snarled, and turned away from her. He strode down the sidewalk, hands balled into fists in the pockets of his overcoat. Up ahead, the alleged ringleader of the Pervert Mafia was laughing at something one of his cronies had said.

"Fuck. Flack, wait." Delgado from behind him, and a moment later, he saw a flash of red on the periphery of his vision. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? I know this can't be easy for you, but you're just gonna have to gut it out."

_What would you know about it? _he thought with vicious cynicism. _There isn't a ring on your finger, but department scuttlebutt has it there's been plenty of plugs in your socket. Rumor has it that you were bonin' the desk sergeant at the 51st, and kudos to you if you actually got that old limp-dick to stand at attention. If I was a truly petty bastard, I might actually believe the rumors that you blew your way onto the Vice Squad instead'a earnin' it on your feet like Bonasera did._

"They're goin' into that bar," he muttered out one side of his mouth, and jerked his head in the direction of a grotty, hole-in-the-wall dive called _The Rack Room. _He bit the inside of his cheek to the quell a bark of laughter at the bitter irony.

Inside the bar, it was dimly lit, or he supposed it was. The greyness that had fallen over his vision after Rebecca fled down the cracked pavement and took all the colors with her had not lifted. The bar was packed, and the ash people drifted around him, vague and ephemeral as smoke.

An elbow nudged him in the ribs. "There he is," Delgado whispered in his ear, and pointed to a private booth where the alleged ringleader and his coterie were settling in.

_That must be the VIP booth, _he mused sardonically. _The vinyl isn't ripped in half a dozen places._

"You find us a table," he told her. "I'll be right back." He started to thread his way through the living fog to the bar, where the golden taps flared like beacons.

"Where are you going?"

"To get a fuckin' drink."

"We're on the clock."

As if that mattered anymore. "I don't care."

The liquid in the glass the bartender gave him looked like water, and so he drank like it was even if it burned on the way down and settled in the pit of his stomach like a warm ember. _Fire water, _he thought as he downed his third shot. _I think that's what the Indians called it. Now I know why._

Delgado was scowling at him in thinly-veiled disapproval, but he ignored her in favor of watching the ash people as they drifted aimlessly around the bar. Flecks of red and gold were everywhere, bright and startling in the overwhelming grey, and it suddenly occurred to him that there was something important about that color combination. His brow furrowed as he tried to draw the memory forth, but the fire water had blurred the clarity of his mind's eye, and he heard only a snatch of a long-ago conversation, Rebecca's voice, weary and subdued.

_-or of the house of_, it said, and then it faded.

_Well, the gold could be her hair. To this day, you've never seen anything like it. The bottle blondes that sashay down 5th Avenue could never hope to match it. Even if they could capture the color, they could never reproduce the texture or the sweet scent of it. It's spun silk and liquid sunshine, and even before you knew her well enough to run your fingers through it or taste it on your mouth, your eyes were drawn to it. She calls it her crowning glory, and that's exactly right._

_You love to run your fingers through it, and sometimes when she's feeling wicked, she draws it over your bare belly and cock. Or she wraps it around your prick when she's jerkin' you off, and the combination of her soft hair, dry palms, and wet mouth is enough to make your ears pop. Gold is the color of your love's hair._

The memories the voice conjured made his cock twitch, and he shifted in his seat.

_What's red, then?_

_Blood, _came the simple answer. _Red is the color of blood and retribution._

_-ed more blood than all the rest_, said Rebecca's voice in the back of his mind, and then the answer came to him.

Red and gold had been the colors of her house, the house of lions. She had been a child of serpents, she'd told him, sitting propped in their bed with four months' worth of Junior making a hump beneath the bedsheet, but she'd gone to battle in the colors of the lion. She'd marched across the castle greensward with a wand in her hand, and by the time she'd been carried back to the castle six days later by the man she called the Serpent King, the gold had been swallowed by a tide of red drying to black. Blood.

_They spilled more blood than the rest, _she said, propped on her pillows with her hands plucking restlessly at the sheets. _The Serpent King said it was because they were fools and idealists, and he was right, but they also had balls of solid brass, and if they were going to die, then they were going to take as many of the enemy with them as they could. They fought hard and died hard, and when the dust cleared and the Ministry started counting the bodies, the only group with a bigger pile than the Gryffindors was the Death Eaters they'd killed. Long live the house of lions, _she finished bitterly.

_What did you go down as? _he asked, and stroked her belly.

She snorted. _A Gryffindor, of course. That's what I was according to the school records. Oh, but I was a Slytherin to the bones, and if anybody ever needed proof of that, all they had to do was look at the marks I left on the fourteen bodies by Hagrid's hut. The asp has ever been at the heel of the lion, and it wouldn't surprise me if they resumed their rivalry as soon as the dead were decently shrouded. _

_That bad?_

_Mmm. But it can be overcome. I married a Gryffindor, after all, and now I'm bearing his child._

_Does that mean he's gonna come out with fangs and a lion's tail?_

She'd laughed then, and so had he, but he wasn't laughing now. He was thinking of something she'd said(_the asp has ever been at the heel of the lion_), and of a play he'd seen his senior year of high school. He couldn't remember what it was called or who had written it-Shakespeare, maybe, but he remembered one character with perfect clarity.

Medea. Medea, who became so enraged at her husband's treachery that she murdered the two children she'd borne him. Medea, who stood over the bodies of her children with blood on her hands and that terrible Death's Head smile on her face. Medea with the vacant eyes and murderous heart. The rest of the play had bored him to tears, but that scene had dried the spittle in his mouth and made his balls crawl into his belly. Medea had given him nightmares.

He stood so abruptly that he almost upended his chair. "I'm gonna go take a leak," he announced too loudly, and headed for the bathrooms and the battered payphone in the alcove.

Delgado snared his elbow in her red-nailed hand. "Flack, for God's sake, don't. I know what you're thinkin', but you can't. Just hang in there."

He shook free of her grip. "Tell me somethin', dear," he said.

"Yeah?" Wary.

"You ever sleep with a guy who was still there in the mornin', or did he just leave the money on the dresser?"

The slap was hard and stinging when it came, and grey became sepia for the briefest instant.

"You're a bastard," she spat, and flopped into her chair again

He knew he had scored a deep and unfair hit, but he could not spare the energy to care. He shouldered his way to the payphone, pulling silver from his pocket as he went. He'd intended to call Rebecca, but by the time he reached the phone, he'd changed his mind. She rarely picked up if she didn't recognize the number, and even if she did, she'd likely hang up as soon as she heard his voice. He slipped the coins into the slot and did something he hadn't done since he was sixteen: he called his father for help.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

This was dying. She knew because she had felt this once before, for eight days in May of 2006. She had sat beside a hospital bed and given her breath so that he would keep breathing. She would hold her breath and watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall, will it to keep expanding. She would hold her breath until her chest ached and her eyes throbbed, because if he couldn't, then she wouldn't. She would simply lie down and die with him.

She couldn't breathe. She simply lay on her side on the cold, tile floor and gaped uselessly, mouth open and eyes glassy with tears. She tasted snot and salt on her tongue and coughed, a phlegmatic, rattling wheeze. The bathroom lights wavered, and she pressed her burning cheek to the cool floor.

_I can't breathe, _she thought dully, and the realization brought no panic, only a sour relief. _If I can't breathe, then I can't feel. The numbness will settle in and burrow deeper and deeper into my bones. Fingers and toes first, and then it'll spread up my arms and legs and into my stomach. It'll take Junior's place in my womb and grow there, and if I give it enough time, it'll reach out and crush my heart in its nerveless, liberating fingers._ Her lips twitched.

_If you can't breathe, why are you cryin', girl? _her grandfather asked. _You got your asshole blowing in reverse?_

She was so flummoxed by the image that conjured that she blinked and hiccoughed in surprise. Then the comical scenario was blotted out by the recollection of Don holding hands with another woman at a table in a fancy restaurant, and the pall of misery descended again, a cold fire that cramped her chest and stiffened her limbs. She drew a shuddering, razor-wire breath and spat it out again, and her fingers clawed spasmodically at the worn tile grout.

Her grandfather was right, though; she _was _crying. It was a low, animal sound pulled from her gut. _Hunh. Hunh. Hunnnh. _Broken and brittle, a garbled moan possessed of perverse eloquence.

_A gut wound, _her grandfather muttered prosaically. _Deep and lethal by torturous, ruinous degrees. A gut wound can take hours or even days to kill, and most of the time, it's not the wound itself that does the Reaper's work. It's the infection, the slow, patient fever-boil of a festering wound. All it takes is one speck of dirt or undetected shrapnel to hide beneath the dressing, and the damage is done. It breeds, hot and virulent and sickly-sweet, and all the doctors and nurses can do is watch the body rot._

_You saw more than your fair share of a gut wound's handiwork as a stripling during the War. The Hogwarts infirmary was never big enough to hold them all, no matter how many Expansion Charms the overworked Aurors and Mediwizards cobbled together. The wounded spilled into the corridors, and before it was over, they were on top of and under the tables in the Great Hall and carpeting the entrance hall of the castle. By the last week, there was no one left to carry them off the field and no place to put them even if there had been, and so they suffered, rotted, and died where they fell._

_That swot, Granger, put her mind to use and organized a medical trench for the wounded who still had a chance at survival. The Triage Trench was what the Mediwizards called it, but the rest of you-those of you with eyes and a lick of sense left in your addled brains, that was-called it what it was: The Devil's Abattoir. _

_No one wanted to look at it, but sometimes it couldn't be helped. You peered over the lip a time or two, and what you saw in those reluctant glimpses will last a lifetime. You remember the bodies. In the beginning, some practical and idealistic soul-Granger again, like as not-tried to arrange them in tidy, symmetrical rows, but it didn't take long for the fanatical order to give way to chaos, and the dying crowded each other. Soon they were stacked like writhing cordwood._

_St. Mungo's sent nurses and Mediwizards and novice apprentices, and they slogged through the muck in the trench with grim determination, their green smocks spattered with mud and shit and blood and piss. Sterility protocols went out the window, and they ripped bandages from one patient to use on another. Your most vivid memory of the trench was seeing Madam Pomfrey wading, ankle-deep, through the sluice in that trench, that godawful Devil's brew of piss, blood, shit, and sloughed skin. She had the hem of her smock bunched in both grimy hands, and her scrawny, old-woman's ankles were slathered in gore._

_She looked at you over the lip of the trench, and her face was haggard and streaked with dust and the remnants of other people's lives. You were startled at how old she looked, how wasted and slat-thin she was inside her clothes. That wasn't the woman with whom you'd gone toe-to-toe two years earlier, when Harry Potter was the world's most famous vegetable and the Serpent King's head was on the chopping block. It was a wraith in Pomfrey's clothing, and you half-expected her to walk among the bodies, ringing a bell and calling for both sides to bring out their dead. But she never did. She just trudged from patient to hopeless patient, sponging faces and bringing dirty water to cracked, burning lips. _

_The worst part of the trench wasn't the sight, but the smell, that hideous, rotten-pork reek that blanketed everything for a hundred yards in every direction. It was the gassy, sickly-sweet stink of overripe fruit and spoiled meat, of bodies run to rancid fat. It made your guts heave and your eyes water even if you breathed through your mouth and cast Masking Charms underneath your nose. It was the smell of the end._

_The trench was where you learned about gut wounds. You never graced the trench, but you saw plenty who did. They lay in their spot with bandages covering gangrenous wounds, and they were septic for days before they died. The maggots moved in while they were still alive, and you'd watch a green-faced apprentice picking them out of leg and arm stumps and empty eye sockets with dirty, ragged fingers._

_They were all bad, those infected wounds, all ended the same way-with the bearer dying in their own shit, raving all the way to Charon's ferry-but gut wounds were the worst. They had their own smell, a simmering, ominous, primeval stench, shit and digestive juices and raw meat, and the wounds would weep and fester and make the poor bastards speak in tongues._

_One bearer of a gut wound was a young Auror fresh out of the academy. He'd taken a Sectumsempra to the gut, and his intestines were peeking through the hole in his abdominal wall, bulging through like an obscene second pecker between his fumbling, incredulous fingers. He was dazed as his fellow Aurors dragged him into the trench, and he vomited blood, black and clotted, onto the earth. His friends knew he was dead; they kissed him before they clambered out of the trench with their blue robes clinging to their calves and ankles. You knew it, too, and the ruthless pragmatist in you wondered why Pomfrey even bothered. She had to know what you did. But you knew the answer to that question without having to ask it. She was a Hufflepuff, and Hufflepuffs never gave up. They were Gryffindors without the glory, tenacious as the badgers that adorned their House crest. She would go on until there was no hope, and that was that, and that was beautiful, and you admired her even as you recognized the futility of her task._

_It took twelve days for him to die, and you remember thinking that it was like some perverse Twelve Days of Christmas, where coal was just the foreplay. You saw him the first day by accident because you and Seamus Finnegan were spotting each other to the shit pit that used to be the Hogwarts moat, but after that, there was nothing accidental about it. You went by every day under the pretense of scavenging for wands or other magical weaponry, and you looked into the pit._

_At first, you told yourself that you were looking because you hoped to see a miracle, but that was a dirty lie, and you knew it. You made that trip every day because you _wanted _to watch him die, to see if he carried death with the same grace as those born with one mangled foot already dangling off the precipice. It was a petty, vicious, twisted thought, and you hated yourself for it, but you couldn't help it, either. You had to know, so you picked your way over the bodies on the same path every day, and if anyone ever asked why you chose to walk into the heart of the miasma, you just told them that's where most of the usable weapons were. The Mediwizards tossed them over the side during injury assessment. It was true as far as it went, even if it didn't go all the way to the truth._

_The first day, he was still lucid, but the fever patches were blooming on his cheeks, and he was shivering beneath the ragged, filthy tatter of blanket. He saw you studying him from the lip of the trench._

It'll be all right, miss, you'll see, _he told you, and tried to offer you a reassuring smile, but blood bubbled between his teeth like plum pudding._

No, it won't, _you wanted to say. _You're for the carrion crows. _But you just nodded and crept back to Seamus Finnegan and didn't say a word for the rest of the night._

_By the fourth day(_on the fourth day of christmas the good lord gave to me)_, delirium had set in, heralded by the high, sweet stink of pus and rotten meat, and he raved. His eyes rolled to whites in their sockets, and his swollen tongue spoke in gabbled, garbled riddles. Sometimes, he spoke in foreign languages-French and Polish and maybe even Yiddish-but mostly he spoke in the language of the dead, glottal consonants and swallowed, throttled vowels._

_By the sixth day_(on the sixth day of christmas the good lord gave to me), _the maggots had settled in, and the wound festered and clotted with a foul mixture of shit and infection. His stomach bloated with gas and rot and God knew what, and talking had been abandoned in favor of crying and screaming and vomiting. His lips were cracked and bleeding and covered in milky foam. His hands opened and closed and left parallel furrows in the wet ground._

_You went back on the eighth day(_on the eighth day of christmas the good lord gave to me)_. God knows why. The experiment had long since lost its novelty and given its answer. Death was just as ugly for the blessed as it was for the broken. It was equally graceless and equally savage, and there was no dignity in it. It was the great equalizer. You didn't want to see any more, to know any more, but it was a diseased, swooning compulsion, like spreading your twisted legs for the pulsating spray of the shower heads when you discovered the first, clumsy joy of self-service sex. You went because you couldn't _not _go, and you watched._

_By the tenth day_(on the tenth day of christmas the good lord gave to me), _you wondered why Madam Pomfrey didn't put him out of his misery. She didn't have to speak the two forbidden words that burned on the tip of your tongue like passion fruit, the ones that would earn her the clammy embrace of a Dementor. There were Bone-Breaking Curses and Severing Hexes and Compression Charms. There was the simple, final twist of a neck. She could have done it easily and quickly, and the unearthly, glutinous yowling of the damned would finally stop. But she never did. She just mopped his brow and stepped over his blindly groping hands._

_The thing that had once been a young Auror stared at nothing and clawed stupidly at the dirt, unwittingly digging his own grave in the mire of human soup. He was emaciated at the end, filled with nothing but the infection that had consumed him from the inside out, and his bony ankles and knobbed, fleshless heels dug into the mud with a wet squelch. His blood-stained teeth were enormous inside his gaunt face, and his eyes were opaque marbles. He smiled at nothing. He knew death was coming for him, and he was glad._

_On the twelfth day_(on the twelfth day of christmas the good lord gave to me)_, he left the world with a final _glat! _No dramatic soliloquy, no parting pearl of wisdom. Just that one nonsense syllable and the gut-wrenching stink of diseased shit. You lurched away from the trench with your eyes bulging and your heart triphammering in your throat, laughing and retching at the same time._

_Seamus Finnegan found you beside the shit pit, laughing and singing the Twelve Days of Christmas, flopped bonelessly over the side of your chair with your hair dragging the dirt. You were laughing so hard that you couldn't breathe, and he told you later that they sounded like sobs. Maybe they were, because tears streamed down your too-warm cheeks like blood, and there was certainly no joy in your heart, only a sick shame that you had watched an Auror die like it was a spectator sport and felt nothing but horrified curiosity and a guilty relief that it wasn't you. You laughed to keep from screaming, and to this day, you're not certain it worked._

_The Auror was who you thought about in those long hours after midnight when you were holding Don's limp hand in the ICU and willing him to keep breathing. You knew the doctors and nurses had taken exceptional care with him because he was a boy in blue, and that they'd picked out every last fleck of masonry, plastic, and copier. They'd safeguarded against the possibility of infection with massive infusions of antibiotics. You knew all of this, saw evidence of it in the snarl of plastic tubing jutting from his hands and arms, but you couldn't shake the conviction that the gut wound was going to claim him, too, and it would be just as long and agonizing as it was for that Auror._

_You didn't dare sleep at his bedside because every time you closed your eyes, you saw blood bubbling from between plum-pudding teeth and smelled the reek of suppurating flesh beneath medical gauze. Adrenaline kept you awake for the first 72 hours after surgery, and when that finally started to ebb, you slipped away for bottles of No-Doze. You dry-swallowed them by the trembling fistful, crunched them between furry, coffee-stained teeth and gagged at the sour grit. You didn't sleep for eight days, almost nine, because once those blue eyes opened, you didn't want to lose sight of them again._

_On the fifth day_(on the fifth day of christmas my true love gave to me. _And oh, wasn't _that _just a blast from the past that made your skin crawl. You thought it every day that your love was dreaming, and you never could quite place why. And now you know the rest of the story as old Paul Harvey would say.), you had a waking nightmare in the overbright confines of your Sleeping Beauty's bower of glass. You dreamed he opened his eyes, and instead of the bright, blue eyes to which you had grown accustomed, they were cataracted milkglass. He reached for you with dirt-caked fingers and smiled at you with plum-pudding teeth, and as he reached for you, black bile seeped from underneath the bandages._

_You made it to the bathroom before you succumbed to gibbering hysteria. You meant to hole up in the handicapped stall, but you made it as far as the back wall, and then the sobs rattled you out of the chair and onto the floor. That's where Hawkes found you, huddled under the sinks and wailing incoherently in the dirty paper towels that nobody bothered to clean up. He thought it was just a delayed reaction to the stress of the past few days, and he hmmed and mmmed while you coughed and gagged and scrabbled at the floor. He didn't realize that you were caught in the grip of total recall and digging a grave for an Auror who had wasted his last coherent words telling you a pretty lie._

_You couldn't stop crying. You just cried and cried and rocked and rocked and dug your grave. It came up like bile, and you spat it on the floor in great, noisy gobbets of sound. You were convinced that your sins had come home to roost, that God knew about your perverse experiment at the edge of the trench and was going to exact His vengeance by tainting your love's scrupulously clean wound. He was going to blight them so that he rotted from the inside out for twelve long days and departed the world on a single, nonsense syllable. God never forgets, and your husband was going to pay for your indifferent eyes peering over the crumbling lip of that trench all those years ago._

_You tried to tell him, tried to confess. _My fault. My fault, _you moaned, and coughed on slimy, bitter guilt, but Hawkes just looked at you with compassionate, uncomprehending eyes and murmured that none of this was your fault in his soothing, doctor's tenor. _

Rebecca, none of this is your fault, _he said over and over again, crouched beside the sink on his lithe haunches. The whites of his eyes were luminescent in the darkness beneath the sink. _Not your fault. We're going to get him through this, and he's going to make a full recovery. Now, why don't you come out from under there and let me take you to the cafeteria for a bowl of soup? I can't promise it'll be good, but at least it'll be warm.

_But you didn't want a bowl of tepid, watery soup. You wanted absolution. So you shook your head and scrabbled mindlessly at the floor with ragged, fraying nails, and he didn't try to stop you, not until your frantic strokes left bloody weals behind. Then he reached into the shadows with his beautiful surgeon's hands and pulled you into the light, a reluctant child pulled kicking, screaming, and bloody from a diseased and dying womb._

_He held your shivering, spasming body against his strong, still one, and you recoiled because that was Don's place, not his. You yowled and sputtered and choked on snot, and when you were exhausted, he lifted you into your chair and rolled you into the cafeteria, where he force-fed you soup the same color as the walls, and only after you'd eaten three slices of toast and downed a cup of hot chocolate did he let you go back to your Sleeping Beauty. You waited until he was out of sight, and then you rolled into the bathroom and crunched half-a-dozen No Doze._

_You shook, shook, shook all the time, a buzzing thrum in your nerve endings that never quieted. You refused to leave the next time the nurses came in to change the bandages. You had to be sure that the rot hadn't gotten into him, the seething triumph of the gut wound. So you set your brakes and watched as they undressed your prince. It made you want to cry, seeing him without even a sheet to protect his cherished dignity, and you were tempted to drive them out with your magic and your rage, but you had no choice but to let their trained hands do for him what you couldn't. You watched them, and you hated them, and when they were gone, you rolled to his bedside, rearranged his sheets, and apologized for not having steadier hands._

_Three days later, he opened those beautiful eyes for real, and your name was the first word out of his mouth. Not Mac or Stella or his mother's. Yours. It was soft and slurred and laced with pain, but it held enough power to drive the demons back. He drifted in and out of awareness for the next few days, but his hand responded to yours even when his eyes were closed, and whenever you whispered _I love you_, he squeezed hard enough to make your fingers ache. The gut wound had passed you by._

_But oh, you got a gut wound now, girl, and the poison runs deep. You're never going to draw it all out. It's probably going to kill you; you're probably going to bleed out on this floor. If you don't bleed to death or strangle on the memories hunkering on your chest and in your lungs like croup, you'll die from the infection, just like that Auror in the trench._

_You know what the bitch of that is, my girl? It'll take a lot longer than twelve days. It'll take the rest of your life. You'll scrape yourself off this floor and find the strength to pack your clothes and pick up your son from his grandparents'. You'll find enough mule-necked pride and bitterness to leave New York behind like you left Scotland at seventeen. You'll find a new home and a new job, and you might even gather the courage someday to leave his name in the records of a county clerk._

_But you'll never outrun the rot. It'll find you every time you look at your son, who carries his father's face. It'll slip into the wounds that his innocent face reopens whenever he smiles at you or toddles over to show you the picture he drew for you. It'll sink its vicious, killing teeth into your bones and guts on the day your Junior asks about his father. It'll claim you in the end, and until it does, you'll carry its identifying mark in the pale strip of flesh on the third finger of your left hand._

She raised her hand from the floor and peered at the wedding ring on her third finger with bleary, tear-scalded eyes. The small band of diamonds inset into the gold winked with mocking promise, and she closed her eyes against the sudden image of Don slipping it onto her finger with his warm, gloved hand. Oh, it hurt. God, how it hurt, and she curled in on herself, hands pressed to her stomach as if to staunch a wound.

_A gut wound, _she thought deliriously. _Can't fix those, _and shuddered convulsively.

Had she really thought this was her fairy tale, her happily ever after? Of course she had. She must have. Here she was, lying on the bathroom floor in the throes of a sickness with no name.

_Oh, it's got a name, all right, _her grandfather corrected gently. _It's heartsickness._

She thought that wasn't quite right, but before she could offer a better name, her burning stomach locked, and she was scrabbling wildly for the toilet bowl. Her sweating fingers jammed painfully on cold porcelain, and color blossomed behind her eyes.

She tried to shout, "Fuck," but all that emerged from her mouth was a sour, dangerously wet belch. She twisted desperately, and a muscle in her lower back gave a sharp, sizzling twang of protest. She hissed through gritted teeth and groped for the ring of the toilet seat.

_Mourning sickness, _she thought stupidly, and vomited. It was sour and sickly-sweet, and her muddled brain insisted on crying while her stomach heaved, so that she nearly aspirated bile. She coughed and spluttered and slalomed drunkenly in front of the bowl. Her knees howled at the unnatural position and the hardness of the tile under them. Her long hair, trailed into the dirty toilet water, and as she watched a golden tendril float in a seductive dance with a scrap of partially-digested lettuce, she was seized with a crush despair and bone-deep loneliness.

_If Don were here, he'd've ambled into that bathroom to see what was the matter by now. He'd crouch beside me and brush the hair from my face and ask if I was all right even if it was the lamest, most obvious question in the world. Then he'd pick me up from the floor and sit me in my shower chair with a bowl so that I could vomit without wrenching my knees from their sockets. When I was done, he'd wash my hair and hand me the Listerine, and then he'd tuck me into bed and clean up the mess. That's the way it always goes. It was a ritual when I was pregnant with Junior and tossing my cookies at the drop of a hat._

But there was no one here to perform the ritual now, just the tart stink of her own puke mingling with the faint scent of old cleaner.

"I want my baby," she moaned pitifully.

_Except he's night your baby anymore, _said a mournful voice inside her head. _And who knows how long it's been since he was? _

An image arose in her mind of Don's lips forming the word _pumpkin_ just before they grazed another woman's knuckles, and she slumped to the floor with a glottal, furious wail.

"Mine. He was my prince," she gasped to the empty room, and let the sobs take her, hard and wracking and merciless. She burned with them, bowed and arched as they winnowed through her veins like lye. She was on a pyre, and she was sure that at any moment, she would burst into flame in an immolating fire.

_No phoenix, you, and isn't that a blessing?_

_I told you love was poison, _murmured a silky voice inside her head. _I was a bastard, hard and cruel as the Scottish earth I once defended with you, but I never lied, never shielded you from the truth. Not you. I owed you that much. I told you the truth, though I did not couch it in kindness, and you hated me for it. But I always pay my debts, Miss Stanhope._

_I warned you that love was poison, insidious as nightshade and twice as deadly, and you did not believe. For all your proclamations of jaded cynicism, you wanted to believe in happy endings, be as blind and ignorant and saccharine as your Gryffindor housemates. You longed for the myth of happily ever after. McGonagall and the old fool would happily let you persist in your delusions, but not I. Is that not the greatest obligation of love, to tell the truth no matter how savage the bladed tongue?_

_I told you, foolish child, and now look at you. You were once a stubborn chit who brought Dolores Umbridge to her knees in a bit of Slytherin cunning I could not help but admire. You displayed treachery and savagery in all its glory, and if you tried to tell me that your ears don't ring with the memory of Vector screaming and writing in the grip of Cruciatus, I'd know you for a liar. Your legs were broken, but your fangs were not. Those were long and full of venom._

_You were stronger as a stripling child than most adults whose paths I have ever crossed, and love has reduced you to a weeping wreck on the bathroom floor. Alone, you could bend the world to your indomitable will, change the course of rivers and time. Bitterness and self-reliance made you impenetrable. The girl who needed no one has been replaced by a spineless milksop paralyzed by the prospect of life without her better half. A house divided cannot stand, Miss Stanhope. Even the Muggles knew that._

She had been so proud of Don Flack, dazzled by the possibility that such a sweet, gorgeous, _normal_ man had been interested in her. It had been flattering and heady, and more than once, she'd pinched herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming as she primped in front of her mirror for a date.

_And _that _was a change, wasn't it? _grunted her grandfather, and it was possessed of a gravelly, aching tenderness. _You always kept yourself clean and tidy. Life in an institution had long ago instilled a pedantic need for personal cleanliness, but you'd never primped, never worn hose or tied ribbons in your hair or painted your nails. Hell, shaving your legs was a hit-or-miss proposition, sandwiched between staff meetings and office hours. You saved your energy for the more pressing demands of getting by in New York-the broken subway turnstiles and the elevators that stood inert in their shafts despite all the frustrated button-pushing in the world._

_But Don made you feel beautiful, so you wanted to _be _beautiful. You stopped at makeup counters and tested the lipsticks and the rouges, and you let the counter girls work their inexpert but good-hearted magic. You invested in nail polish and moisturizers and softly-scented body lotions. You experimented with depilatory creams, and for the first time since puberty seeded hair beneath your skin, your legs and armpits were bare. You considered mucking with the coarse that between your legs, too, but after a vivid nightmare about mixing up hair remover with Miracle-Gro, you decided to let that sleeping dog lie._

_You even bought dainty underthings-lacy bras and panties and a pair of scanty nylons. Oh, you still have a drawer full of old warhorses, tattered, cotton bloomers with more stains than a sous chef's apron, but when you knew there was going to be loving, you wore the danties. They made you feel wanton and seductive and unapologetically feminine, and those were feelings as foreign as moondust before Don entered your life._

_You loved it when he spider-walked his fingers over your nylons from sole to thigh. It made you shiver. _He _made you shiver with the way he looked at you. His hands were always soft, but his eyes, they burned cobalt inside that handsome face, and he poured fire from his lips every time he whispered in your ear or murmured sweet nothings into the shallow valley between your breasts. _

_It intoxicated you to think that you, with your strange, fractured angles could affect a man like that. That knowledge was as arousing as the skillful work of his hands and mouth. Sometimes more. The glazed want in his eyes or the outline of his erection against the fabric of his pants was enough to dry the spittle in your mouth and dampen your panties. His ragged breath against the shell of your ear when you slipped your hand into his boxers could make the room spin and your nipples furl inside your blouse._

_You had never thought of yourself as anyone's lover. In fact, you'd never viewed yourself as a woman at all. You used to tell Neville and Seamus that you were Rebecca Stanhope, brain in a box, and when neither of them, sweet souls, both, contradicted you, you accepted it as truth. When Don chose you from all the women in the city to share his body and his bed, you couldn't believe it, and you fell into it with abandon._

_There was no part of you he could not touch, could not imbue with a lascivious fever heat. Kisses weakened your knees, and his fingers tracing gentle lines over the bony knobs of your spine made your heart stutter. He reduced you to malleable putty in his big, warm hands, and he coaxed your fractious limbs into positions you never thought possible._

_You trusted him, and you let him teach your body about acts it never knew to crave. You let him tie you up with scarves and cuff you and bend you over the kitchen table and have his way with you while the table jounced under his bucking hips and the wool from his dress blues scratched your ass. When you were a girl the idea of taking a man's prick into your mouth repulsed you. After all, you knew what came out of there, and after long years in the company of more boys than girls, you also knew how sloppy they could be._

_But Don made you want to try it. You wanted to see how he would react, what sounds you could coax from him with your curious tongue. You weren't sure what to expect that first time, but he smelled clean and vaguely musky, and when your tentative lips slid over the hard, quivering head of his prick, he tasted of warm flesh, copper and sea salt. It was a foreign taste, but not a _bad _one by any stretch. The taste of him when his hips arched and his eyes rolled back was thicker and more bitter than you'd anticipated, but that wasn't terrible, either. Once you got used to it, you started to actively crave it, to daydream of it when you were alone in your cramped office with nothing to do but shuffle idly through stacks of your pupils' ineptitude._

_But the taste wasn't what made you an addict. It was the sounds he made when your eager, quick-study tongue scoured the rigid, supple underside of his shaft or lapped the sensitive, glazed head. They shivered along your nerve endings like the notes from an Aeolian harp, thrummed in your bones, and whenever you heard the groans and moans your mouth wrenched from the pit of his belly, your brain shut down, and there was only deep, ravenous want, heavy and insistent as nausea._

_He was a strong, proud man, your prince, but you could make him beg. With a flick of your tongue, you could rob him of the ability to speak, could convince his well-toned muscles to twitch and cramp and claw his broad fingers into the unprotected fabric of the couch. You could make them fist and curl into your hair in a frenzied attempt to urge you downward. If you touched a certain spot behind the fleshy heaviness of his balls while the tip of your nose grazed the coarse hairs of his Adam's thicket, you could make him forget to breathe, and with that secret in hand, there was no giving up this monkey. The thrill of it ran too deeply in your blood._

_Of course, he had his means of power, too, and he exercised it just as fiercely and wickedly as you. It's a dirty thing he does, dirty, wicked, and shameful. When you were a tiny mite of a girl with the aching buds of breasts on your chest and the faintest wisps of hair between your legs, your sex ed counselor at that cripple ranch for the Houdini set told you that while love between a man and a woman was perfectly natural and in the Good Lord's natural order, there were certain things good girls refused to do even with their husbands. She never said what these forbidden fruits were, but you could guess because you were a smart girl with a vivid imagination. And you didn't need Mrs. Prissypants Simmons, with the too-tight hose and the fever-blister rouge to tell you that what he sometimes offers you is one of those things._

_You were in Atlantic City the first time it happened. You'd been married six months, and since you'd demurred on a proper honeymoon to spare his strained budget, he took you for a weekend across the way. He'd wanted to take you somewhere else, he said, to Maine for the lobster and the roaring Atlantic, or to Maryland for the crab cakes, but there wasn't enough time in a short weekend, and besides, he thought you'd enjoy the lights and the endless numbers of the casino. If you had your heart set on the sea, he'd take you to the Jersey shore._

_He was right. You did enjoy the lights and the numbers, even if you could have done without the noise and the hum of endless conversation. You stuffed yourself gormless at the casino buffets and drank and even danced a little, swaying to the music while he whirled you around the floor in his arms. You played the slots and dabbled in probability and a spot of clandestine Arithmancy to pocket a tidy chunk of change. Not too much; it wouldn't do much to attract the attention of the goombas who patrolled the floor in slick, three-piece suits, but enough to pay for the trip and sock away a nest egg for you and Don's golden years._

_And there was the loving. Always the loving. You were surprised that your persnickety love, who knew far too much about what people left behind on bedding, would ever agree to a romp in a strange bed, but he had prepared for the weekend in every detail and brought his own sheets. You laughed until you cried as you watched him tuck in the corners and fuss over the creases, but he was serenely unfazed._

Hey, a tumble in a strange bed is a damn fine thing that shouldn't be missed, _he said sagely as he padded from one side of the bed to the other in his socked feet to tuck in a corner. _I just don't wanna scratch my ass the next morning and find a souvenir from some guy's nutsack.

_That made you laugh until you nearly choked to death, but he was right about that, too. It was a fine thing, a nasty-fine thing. You could be as loud as you wanted without worrying about Mrs. Petrinski's nasal, reedy voice coming through the wall like noxious carbon monoxide to break the mood. You could exhort him to go harder, faster, and deeper in the cheesiest, most vulgar language because nobody was going to give you the stinkeye in the morning, and if they did, who cared? They were never going to know your name or where you lived._

_The first night was just languid lovemaking to temporarily consecrate the bed as yours and another pre-dawn romp with rum and Coke on your mouths, sloppy and scrabbling and feverish because you needed the simple comfort of union. You fell asleep without bothering to shower, and when you woke up, your tangled bodies parted reluctantly, masking tape peeled from particleboard._

_But the next night… That night, he was primal and possessive. He spent a lot of time with the lubricant, so much that you told him you were A1-A in the hemorrhoid department, thanks. He bit your shoulder as he positioned himself behind you, a gentle nip that prompted a surprised gasp._

I'll stop if you want me to, _he whispered into your ear, and one hand slithered up to cup a breast._

_You didn't have the foggiest idea what he meant. You had never wanted him to stop since the day he'd taken you into his bed, but then he pushed into you, and you did want him to stop. It was the wrong damn hole, and it had never been intended as an entrance, only an exit. It was too small, and you were certain he was splitting you in half. Your mouth gawped, and your fingers scrabbled and twisted in the bed linens. His hands gripped your hips, and his breath was warm on your neck and the side of your face when he whispered that it was all right, that he'd stop if you wanted him to. Just say the word, doll. _

_But you didn't say the word. It hurt, but not badly enough to overwhelm the curiosity. That was stronger, truer, and you wanted to see how far he would take it. You took deep breaths and willed yourself to relax, and after a few minutes pain dimmed into tolerable fullness in your belly, and you could concentrate on the softness of his lips on your skin and the gentleness of his fingers as they swept over your taut belly and dipped between your legs to find the slick dampness._

_Curious tolerance turned to wanton pleasure by the end, a fact that surprised him as much as it did you. You still remember the sharp intake of breath when you began meeting his thrusts, and he lost all sense of control when you begged him not to stop. It was hot and nasty and dirty, and you loved it because you were doing something that most of the good girls never dreamed of. You weren't supposed to be getting laid at all, and there you were in a nice hotel, indulging in this beautiful obscenity with your prince. That was the thought that tipped you headlong into the abyss. You were smiling as you came your brains out underneath him, laughing, and the tremors shook you to pieces and his loving hands molded you together again. You did take a shower after that one. You wanted to get dirty, not _be _dirty._

_It's not a proclivity in which you often indulge-God knows what would happen to your pooper if you did-but its rarity increases the thrill. Every three or four months, he assumes that delicious mount, and blood turns to liquid fire in your veins. It's dirty, but sacred, an act of startling intimacy and tenderness for something so rough, and the satisfaction runs deep to know that there is no part of you that he has not possessed._

_You thought it meant something to him, but now you wonder if he wasn't just exploiting your weakness for him and your ravenous need for touch. Maybe while he was telling you you were beautiful, fuckin' beautiful with sweat beading between your breasts and on the flushed nubs of your nipples, he was laughing at your breathless, unalloyed neediness. Maybe while he was whispering in your ear about what doing that to you was doing to him, he was imagining what he would say to his buddies in the precinct. Maybe they all went to Sullivan's for beers and sniggered at how easy it was to get you out of your clothes._

_And if he was doing that, who's to say he wasn't talking out of school about everything else you let him see, all the other vulnerabilities you exposed in the mistaken belief that he'd protect them? Maybe he told them about the accidents you have when you can't find an accessible toilet quickly enough. Maybe he told them about cleaning vomit off your front and shit off your rear after one of your spastic seizures, when your muscles lock and your teeth grind and all you can do is scream your way through the pain. Maybe he bitched about having to spoon-feed broth into your mouth like you were a helpless baby bird because your nervous system was too fried to receive its marching orders, let alone interpret them. Maybe, just maybe, he admitted that he regretted taking you on as his pet pity project._

"No," she whimpered. "No, no. He didn't marry me for pity. He loved me once. I know he did."

_He loves you still, _insisted a fierce voice. _You've too much proof of his devotion to throw it all away on the anger of a moment._

She wanted to believe that voice, _longed _to believe it, but she couldn't trust it. It was the pitiful voice of love disappointed, the voice of a gangly, asexual child who remembered too many nights spent alone in a spinster's bed. It was the voice of forlorn, blind hope, and it came out of her TV every morning at nine, when Jerry Springer salted the wounds of the abused and downtrodden with his microphoned knout.

_He loves you still. _Shrill. White-knuckled panic. _He does. Only love would move him to care for you the way he does. Only that would prompt him to crack jokes while he mops vomit from the bathroom floor and gathers up your soiled clothes to carry to the laundry room downstairs. Only that sweet devotion would move him to feed you soup when you're too weak and logy to do it yourself. He gave you his name and his child. Do you think he would do all of that for mere pity?_

_Then why was he sitting in that restaurant, kissing that woman's hand? Why did he call her _pumpkin_? Why didn't he take the chance to set things right when you offered it? You mean so little to him that he didn't even bother to feign remorse, to run from the restaurant with insincere explanations and apologies at the ready. He just sat there with that beautiful, indifferent face and watched the knife sink home and twist in its mark. You were his plaything and nothing more. He gave you his child because yours was an available womb._

_Besides, this isn't the first time the thought's crossed your mind. His mother said the same when you were in the hospital waiting room, spit it at you like venom. You told yourself it was the grief-stricken ranting of a mother unwilling to accept that she no longer held pride of place in her only son's heart, and that only son assured you of his love four months later while you sat in the ceramic debris of your dinnerware with blood and dust on your hands._

_Now you're not sure. There's been a thaw in the formerly frosty relationship between you and Mother Flack of late, and you assumed it was because of Junior, that wriggling, squalling, marvelous culmination of all her grandmotherly aspirations. His arrival has transformed you from barely-tolerated pariah to accepted member of Clan Flack. She's stopped baring her yellowing fangs at you every time her beloved boy's back is turned, and seeing her with Junior, you understand why your love became the man he did._

_But it wasn't Junior, was it? She can afford to be kind to you now that she knows you for a fool. She smiles freely because she knows her son's heart isn't yours anymore, if it ever was, and while you're blissfully holding his hand or pecking his cheek, she's imagining him hip-deep in his new love._

There was no coherent thought for a long time after that. Just wave after wave of mourning sickness. She cried until her throat hurt and beat her hands against the unyielding tile until their throbbing matched the ache in her chest, and when they could not stand another blow, she scratched until her fingertips were raw and bleeding and painting red phoenix feathers on a clean, white canvas. She vomited constantly. Sometimes she hit the bowl, and sometimes she didn't, and she found that she didn't care either way. She just retched and grimaced and wiped the tendrils of saliva from her lips with the back of one frozen, bloody hand. She cradled her aching, empty stomach.

And she cried. It was a crying without cadence or end, a single, unceasing note pulled from the bottom up and fueled by the death rattle of her dying memories. It was, she realized with no surprise at all, the sound of breathing, and just as permanent. From this day forward, it would accompany and mark all the moments of her life. It would whistle and hum around the rim of her tea mug and seep into her lectures and the lullabies she sang to Junior at night. She would carry it along with her surgical scars and the pinprick scar from the MMR shot she'd gotten as a child.

_Rattle and hum, baby, _she thought. _Rattle and hum._

She cried until her head was heavy and stupid and her nose and ears were plugged. She was still crying when Mrs. Petrinski's voice drifted through the wall.

"Cut it out already," she demanded. "'M tryin' to watch my shows."

"Bite me," she muttered dully, and tittered.

She didn't know how long it was before the voice of the Serpent King spoke again, but it did.

_That, Miss Stanhope, _he murmured, _is quite enough wallowing. Stop sniveling and get up. He's broken your heart, not your spine. The latter is pitiable; the former is not. He is no longer worthy of your time. If he chooses to bed a harlot, then leave him to it. Pack your bags and scrape the dust from your heels and never look back. You've done it before, and you can do it again. All you have to do is remember your hatred._

_That well still runs deep, does it not, Miss Stanhope? And the water is still bitter as gall. All the love of your fallen prince's heart could never sweeten it, nor did you want it to because you knew its potency all too well. Love is fleeting and ephemeral as dreams, but hatred is eternal. It never truly dies. It only sleeps. Hatred drives men to crawl across the battlefield, dragging their entrails behind them, just to sink their teeth into the throat of the enemy one last time. Love is a child's game, but hatred is stronger than the grave. Hatred is the stuff of immortality._

She heaved herself into a sitting position, propped haphazardly against the wall with legs akimbo. She scrubbed her feverish face with her hands and drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Won't get fooled again," she warbled, and cackled. God, she hated that song, but it was true. She wouldn't get fooled again. It was time to cut her losses before love played her for a fool again.

Junior was spending the night with his Nana and Grandpa, and she saw no point in disturbing him. Better to pack and burn the bridges of this life she had made without her screaming, confused, infant son to weaken her resolve. Bloodlettings were best done in private. She would collect him in the morning as planned. In the meantime, she'd pack a bag for them both and take a trip beyond the wall in Grand Central Station to get a hotel room for the next few days. After that, well, she'd take that when it came. She raised her hand to Summon her wand, first two fingers jutting in a tight point.

_You promised him there would be no magic, _shrieked the small, desperate voice of love unconquered.

"Yeah, well, he promised to love no other," she rasped, and in her mind's eye, she saw Don brushing his lips over Jezebel's fingers. "_Accio wand!"_

The scrape and creak of an opening bureau drawer. The rustling jostle of wands shedding a velvet bag. The whoosh of air and the clatter of wands jockeying to reach her first. First one, then the other darted through the bathroom door and landed in her upturned palm. The undeniable weight of them surprised her into tears again.

"Am I really doing this?" she asked the empty room.

_Yes, you are._

She pointed the thicker wand at her chest and clutched the thinner one in one nerveless hand. "_Automus Wingardium leviosa!"_ she said listlessly, and just like that, magic returned to her life, unspectacular and uncelebrated.

She Levitated herself out of the bathroom and into her chair, which was parked beside the bed, and there she sat, broken and dazed. She knew what she should do now, but she lacked the strength to do it. Breathing was a conscious effort of will. She caught sight of her reflection in the vanity mirror and shuddered. All was drawn and in darkness except for her hair, which burned like golden fire in defiance of her sorrow.

_He always loved your hair. He loved to turn it in the light after lovemaking, to smooth it in the sunlight, to bury his face it when he came. You told him it was your crowning glory, but the crown has grown too heavy. Leave it for him in remembrance of what was. Let him come home and find it strewn over the bed like golden silk. He made his bed. Now let him lie in it._

"_Accio scissors!"_

The scissors zoomed into her palm from the kitchen, bright and sleek and eager to please. She stared at their gleaming blades, and for a moment, she was tempted to plunge them into her wrists and anoint them with her lifeblood, but there was Junior to consider. Sweet Junior who smelled of talc and caramel, and who was warm and contented against her breast as he suckled. It wasn't his fault that everything she touched had the disturbing habit of turning to shit.

She opened the blades, raised them alongside her cheek, and stuffed a hank of hair between them. _Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair._

"I loved him. Oh, God, I loved him," she said, and blinked away tears. Her fingers tensed on the cheap, plastic grip of the scissors.

Just then, there came an authoritative rap on the front door. The scissors trembled in her grip.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

**A/N:** Crack AU. This chapter references "Going Under" and "Field of Dreams", which are also archived on this site.

The resurrection of the dead was impossible according to practical people, the hopeless belief of the desperate who refused to believe that death was The End. Don Flack, Sr. had been one of those grimly practical souls for almost sixty years and had abided by the sad faith in that belief even through the death of his daughter. But sitting bolt-upright in bed with the phone clapped to one ear and listening to his son's slurred, heartbroken voice on the other end of the line, he understood that the dead could walk again.

(_oh god pop I'm so sorry I didn't mean'ta I thought she was behind me and then I realized she wasn' and I went right back in after her but it was too late she was already already 'm so sorry pop 'm sorry.)_

_You didn't realize it was your own little girl's death you were respondin' to that night. '93 was the twilight of your career; you were out by '95, and Donnie was in by '97. You'd known for almost a year by then that you were runnin' outta time beneath the blue. You tried to tell everybody, including your wife, that you were all good, that you could go another ten years if you wanted, but it was fuckin' bullshit. Your knees had been bad for years, and your back was followin' suit, and it was getting harder and harder to chase perps down rickety fire escapes and through dirty alleys. Sooner or later, you were gonna go down like a linebacker with a blown Achilles, 'cept it'd be your heart that popped like a goddanmed balloon._

_You knew that time was slippin' away from you, but you weren't ready to give it up just yet because your pussy body was throwin' in the towel. Maybe you couldn't run like you could in your rookie days, when your equipment belt jangled to the beat of your footfalls, but you could still drive, so you cruised the streets in a requisitioned squad car, smokin' Marlboros and listenin' to the crackle of the scanner. You felt a little guilty leavin' Ana and the kids home alone so much, but goin' home meant you had one less day to clip on the badge and be a hero, so you stayed out as long as you could._

_Most'a the time, there wasn't much goin' on. Nothin' that you could justify hornin' in on anyway. Aggravated assaults and B and Es didn't call for a homicide dick unless they left stiffs behind. Halloween was usually busier, and you could count on there bein' a body or two in the ME's trick-or-treat bag by mornin', but that Halloween was slow, and you were just about to call it a night when dispatch came through with a reported possible death at the Whisper House._

_It didn't pop your nuts, to tell the truth. You were convinced it'd turn out to be some poor homeless bastard who'd frozen to death tryin' to find shelter in that dilapidated shitbox. Or maybe the whiskey he drank to keep the cold outta his bones had finally bitten him back. At worst, it was some dumbfuck college kids celebrating Halloween with a little Satanic ritual and mindless fuckin. It was boredom that caused you to radio dispatch and tell 'em you'd take a look._

_The boredom left in a hurry when your headlights swept the street and driveway that led up to Whisper House and showed Donnie doubled over on the lawn with his hands on his knees and breath plumin' from his mouth like the Ghosts of Puke to Come. There were other boys with him, but they were only hulking shapes flittin' and murmurin' beyond the halo of light from your headlights._

_Adrenaline flooded your mouth, and your legs were tryin' to get outta the car before your hands'd finished with the seatbelt. Your first thought was that he and his buddies had come out here to screw around and fantasize about tits and pussy and all the other wonderful delights of the fairer sex, only to have their hard-ons snuffed out by the discovery of a weeks-old body buried beneath one of the rottin' couches. Sure, you'd told him before you left that night not to go anywhere near this dump, but he was a kid-not a punk kid, thank God, but still a kid, and he'd been testin' your limits for a while. You'd figure out exactly what had got him so shook up, and then you'd herd his ass into the car and tear him a new one for disobeyin'._

Donnie! _you barked. _What the hell did I tell-, _And the rest of your hardass routine melted in your mouth like a sour M&M._

_He looked up at the sound of your voice, and the eyes that met yours weren't the bright, inquisitive eyes of your son. They were stunned and blank, a junkie comin' off a cheap street high or a loved one processing the brutal shock of no more and never again. You were so surprised and uneasy about his dazed expression that you stopped in your tracks and blinked stupidly in the glow of the headlights._

Donnie? _you said again. Uncertain now, as though you couldn't remember what you were doing there in the front yard of the Whisper House. His reply erased all hope of the call being a simple matter of a dead body underneath a molderin' couch._

Daddy?

_Not _Pop _or _Dad. Daddy. _Your son was a man in all but name, mostly grown into the body you, his mother, and God had given him, and he hadn't called you _Daddy _since he was eight years old and snaggle-toothed as Alfred E. Newman. He'd called you _Pops _and _Sir _and _Dad, _and once, when he was fifteen and brave, he'd called you a miserable son of a bitch, but _Daddy _had been left behind in childhood, just like the toys that had gathered dust in his room until you'd donated 'em to a children's shelter._

_Yet there he stood, your man-child, stripped of all his adult plumage and reduced to the little boy who used to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and think you wore Superman's cape underneath your blues. He was so lost and vulnerable, and you started toward him on legs gone to wooden stilts._

Daddy. _He never called you that again. Not that night, not ever. The next time he spoke to you, he called you Pops, and for the rest of that night it was _Sir. Yes, sir _and _No, sir _and _I don't know, sir. Daddy _was the last glimpse you ever had of your little boy, and if you had known that, maybe you wouldn'ta let go so easily._

Donnie? _Fear had made you rough, and you seized his arms and jerked him upright. _Donnie, what's wrong? What's the matter? Fuckin' talk to me right now.

_His mouth worked and tears streamed down his face. Snot glistened on his upper lip. Then he began to sob, a hard, ugly wracking that doubled him over and left him clutching blindly at your clothes. He was heavy and clumsy, and you staggered beneath his sudden weight. He was trembling, and as you drew him closer to steady him, you detected the faint odors of beer and piss._

Oh, my boy, _you thought, but you just gathered his face in your hands and said, _Donnie, look at me. Look. I don't know what's happened, but I'm gonna make it right, okay? You just gotta tell me what's wrong, and we'll fix it. _Low and soothing. Cop talk, the tone reserved for a nutjob or a child who has just awakened from a deep and terrible nightmare._

_He gulped, and his chest hitched. _P-pop, it's Diana. _His breath was warm and wet against your cheek._

_The floodgates opened then, and he started to babble, clinging to your shoulders to maintain his balance. But you heard nothing after your daughter's name, not even the insectile buzz of a muted television. The hand of God had reached in and punctured your eardrums with one jab of His finger._

_You disentangled yourself from him and left him sprawling on the lawn like a linebacker in a three-point stance, and legs that had previously claimed kinship with stilts suddenly recalled the secret of flight. You flew across the piebald lawn and up the steps that led into the house, never mind that your knees crackled and popped like the bubble cushion in first-class mail. Panic had transformed a broken-down NYPD warhorse into Carl fuckin' Lewis._

_You skidded to a halt just inside the front door and called for your little girl, an unrecognizable, strangled bleat. _Diana! Diana, it's Daddy.

_You waited, sure that as soon as your eyes adjusted to the pitch darkness, you'd see her creeping out of the shadows with a shamefaced smile and a shy waggle of her fingers. Diana was a good girl. She still knew how to mind you, and you never had to tell her twice. She always came when you called. But she didn't come that time, and your chest tightened. _

Diana Elizabeth Flack, _you called again, _this is your father. You mind me, now, and get your ass here. _Another long minute passed, and there was no Diana and no furtive shuffle of feet to betray her hidin' place. Just dusty silence and the sour air of the house that left grit on your tongue. You grimaced and spat blindly. _Baby girl. _It was almost a wail._

_And then your eyes finally adjusted, and you saw her lyin' at the foot of the stairs, one skinny leg tangled in the other. She was on her back, and you rushed forward to scoop her up. You wondered why Donnie would leave her behind. She was his shadow, and even though he pissed and moaned about it, you knew he secretly reveled in bein' an older brother, in lookin' out for her like you'd taught him. So why-_

_And then you knew. You swayed on the spot as a wave of disbelieving nausea swept over you. You wanted to pick her up, carry her out of the house and away from that bad, dirty place, but once you realized what you were seein', instinct took over, and you backed out of the house and staggered to your patrol car to call it in. You've hated yourself for that ever since. That was when you knew every cruel accusation Donnie had ever hurled at you about bein' more cop than father was true. Any normal father woulda rushed to his child, but you were already beginnin' to process "the scene" with your eyes. Later, Donnie'd admit that he _had _picked her up, had cradled her against his chest, and the lab boys would confirm that were traces of his DNA on her hair and face. The science wasn't as sophisticated then as it is now, and there was no way to tell how it got there, but you've thought about it a lot over the years, and you suspect it came from his tears._

_You never told him-you and Donnie never discussed Diana after that night-but you envied him for that. Yeah, the lab boys could bitch about him contaminatin' and compromisin' the scene, but at least Donnie never lost sight'a what mattered just then. She wasn't just a body, an amalgam of limbs to be documented and examined. She was his baby sister, and she loved him, and she deserved to be fuckin' mourned, and whatever else he'd done wrong in his life, he'd gotten that right._

_You don't remember how you got back to your patrol car. Maybe you dream-walked. The next thing you _do _remember is six units squealin' to a halt in front of that damned house, and their flashers made it look like it was bleedin' where the paint had peeled away. Then the world was awash in shouted orders and muffled feet, and you watched in light-headed detachment as some wet-behind-the-ears uniform wandered to the edge of the lawn with a roll of caution tape tucked beneath one arm. He nodded at you as he unfurled it, and the routine was so deeply-ingrained that you nodded back. Then you realized you were exchanging professional pleasantries while your little girl was coolin' her heels forever at the foot of those stairs, and you had to cram your knuckle into your mouth to keep from cryin' or pukin' or both._

_It was Feldman who came to take your statement. He'd been in the department since Job, and when Donnie and Diana were small, he'd slipped them butterscotch discs from the bowl he kept on his desk. Ana railed against it, but you turned a blind eye because every kid needed an Officer Friendly, and besides, someone had done the same for you when you were in short pants. The only difference was the candy. Your favorite had been chewy caramels._

Heya, Don, _he said diffidently, and in the fleeting strobe of a flasher, you saw that his haggard, hangdog face was streaked with tears. _I'm so sorry. She was-was such a pretty girl.

_The well-intended condolences were hot tar against your skin, and you grunted like somebody had kicked you in the balls._

_He took a breath to gather himself and said, _Aw, God. I, uh, I know there's no right time to do a thing like this, but I, uh, I gotta get your statement.

I was responding to a call from dispatch about a possible body, _you told him dully. _I figured it would turn out to be nothin', or maybe the usual Halloween fuckery by a bunch'a teenagers, you know. _Feldman nodded. Of course he did. You all knew the joys the holiday brought. _When I got here, I saw my boy and three others in the yard. Donnie's hysterical, but he finally manages to tell me it's about his sister. So I go in there, and that's when I find m-the vic.

Aw, God, Don, _Feldman muttered thickly. _D'you mind if I talk to the kid? _He jerked his head in the direction of Donnie, who was sittin' on his ass in the frozen grass. He'd stopped bawlin', but his chest was still hitchin', and he was rockin' back and forth with his arms folded across his knees._

_You shook your head. _Naw, g'head.

_Feldman clapped you on the shoulder and trudged over to Donnie, and you watched as he hunkered awkwardly on the lawn so he could make eye contact. _I'm so sorry, son, _were the first words outta his mouth, and when Donnie started to cry again, the grizzled old bastard didn't hesitate to pull him into a clumsy, one-armed hug. _'S okay, boy, _he murmured. _'S okay to hurt now.

_Feldman did and said everything you shoulda as his father. It shoulda been you down there on the grass with your arm around his neck and his blotchy face pressed into the fabric of your coat, but you were paralyzed with confusion and anger. Anger most of all, phosphorous and lye in the pit of your stomach. After twenty-two years of protectin' the city, this was how God repaid you for a job well done, by stealin' one of your children? It wasn't fuckin' fair. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work. Those who protected were protected in turn. So why was your daughter being photographed by the CSU and the goddamned coroner?_

_Anger. And the greatest of these was anger. It drove you to backhand your broken-hearted son while he watched the paramedics load his sister into the belly of Charon's modern ferry, and later the following afternoon, it led you to beat him in the passenger seat of your car because he had the stones to mourn for a sister his carelessness had gotten killed. You shoulda consoled him, shoulda told him how proud you were of him for not fallin' apart while he stood, naked, in front of a lab boy with his balls in his hand._

_Instead, you slapped him in the face over and over again until your hand went numb. The sound of flesh on flesh was punctuated only by the sound of Donnie gaspin' for breath. It was the sound that prompted the first slap, the low, mournful, keenin' from your son's throat, and suddenly the rage was blindin'. You jammed on the brakes hard enough to make your teeth click and your seatbelt lock, and then you stared at him, the little pussy bastard who'd killed his sister._

_Your hand left the steering wheel and connected with the side of his face before your brain registered the movement, and the slap bounced his head off the passenger window. The sound stopped immediately, but you hit him again anyway, and a third time. The prickling heat felt good on your palm, and each blow bled a little of the anger. Part of you was appalled by what you were doing, but that part was small and far away, cowed by the leviathan fury that coiled in your stomach and heart like disease, so you hit him a fourth time. Every time you counted the anger as spent, it flared again, fueled by the knowledge that when you got home, you were gonna have to tell your Ana that one of her angels had flown from this earth before her._

You. Don't. Ever. Talk. About. Her. Again, _you snarled, each word accompanied by a slap. _Never again. You don't got no right.

_You finally split his lip on an errant slap, and the blood stopped you cold. It was bright in the black and white your world had become since you saw your daughter lyin' at the foot of the stairs. You blinked as you watched it trickle down his chin, and you absently wiped it away with the ball of your thumb. You were too stunned to apologize, and really, you didn't know how to say you were sorry for somethin' like that, so you just returned your hand to the steerin' wheel and started drivin' again. For his part, Donnie just stared straight ahead and never said a word._

_Tellin' Ana was ten times harder than your worst imaginin's, and for a brief moment when her shrill, disbelievin' sobs pierced the air, the rage returned, virulent as ever, but mostly there was sharp guilt and dull shame, and the two conspired to make your stomach cramp. You didn't sleep that night 'cause all you could think about was Donnie's eyes, dead as his sister's, and the way his head thumped against the window with every hit. You worried you mighta damaged him, concussed him, so you sneaked into his room every couple'a hours to be sure that he hadn't followed his sister in his sleep._

_Maybe if you coulda apologized the next mornin', you coulda salvaged your relationship with your boy, but the sight of those bruises on his face when he came down the stairs the next mornin' paralyzed your tongue, and anyway, you had your hands full with Ana, who was so grief-stricken that you had to half-carry her to the toilet. So you told yourself you'd deal with it later and left your son alone with his grief._

_But later never came. The funeral came and went, and you ate the ashes that people brought in covered dishes. The only way to mark the passage of time was by the echoin' retches of your son as he heaved his guts in the bathroom with the risin' and settin' of the sun. You thought it would stop after a week or so, but one month after his sister was in the ground, he was still pukin' up his sorrow._

_You listened to the wet gargles of his mournin', and on Christmas Day, you watched him build a snowman in the front yard. He and Diana built one every year from the time they could walk, and it was the one activity of the day they never fought over. They just put on their boots and mittens and stumped outside. You used to watch 'em from the front window, and it was the same every year. They worked together to roll the base, and then Donnie rolled the torso. The head was Diana's, and so was the face. When she was little, he'd hoist her up so she could reach. She'd put your dress cap on its head and push the coal and carrot into his face. Then Donnie'd set her down and push the toy badge into Frosty's chest, and they'd stand back to admire their handiwork. The end was always marked by a snowball fight, and they'd stamp into the house, wet and red-cheeked and happy._

_That year, he built a snowman by himself. He trudged outside with your hat, the fake badge, and an old scarf, and you watched him go through the motions of the familiar ritual. It was slow without Diana, but he doggedly kept at it, and Frosty rose from the earth once more. Base, torso, and head. He plopped your hat atop Frosty's dome, pinned the badge to his chest, and draped the scarf around his neck. Then he stood back, hands fisted at his side, and surveyed the serenely smiling face._

_He bent and packed the snow at his feet into a tight ball, and then he turned at threw it. It landed a few yards away with a sad whump that made your heart drop into your shoes because it was so final, and so unfair._

_Donnie stared at the spot where the snowball had landed for a long moment, and then he rounded on Frosty. He punched the beatifically smiling face and kicked blindly at the fat, jolly bottom. He tore the badge from Frosty's chest and stomped it into the snow, and he smashed the base and torso with a flurry of kicks and clubbin' blows. He didn't stop until there was nothin' left but your dress cap sittin' on top of a small hump of snow. Then he bent and picked up your cap from the ground. He shook the dust from the brim, and then he just…looked at the spot where Frosty had been._

You didn't like your snowman? _you asked mildly when he returned to the house, and turned your head so he wouldn't see the tears._

He was stupid_, Donnie muttered. He shuffled upstairs with your dress cap still in his hand and slammed his bedroom door hard enough to make it rattle in the frame. That was the last snowman he ever built._

_That was the day you decided to get rid of Diana's things. Maybe then it wouldn't be like rubbin' salt into an open wound every time he opened his eyes. You couldn't actually bring yourself to do it until January. It seemed appropriate to do it then, to give the new year a fresh start. You took down her pictures and removed her chair from the table, and Ana cleaned her room and stripped her bed. When it was down, you cradled the remnants of your daughter's life in your arms and took your little girl for one last ride in the patrol car. You talked to her all the way to the Goodwill, told her you loved her and missed her, and that this didn't mean you were gonna forget her. Passin' those boxes over to the smilin', unsuspectin' lady behind the counter of Goodwill was like watchin' the paramedics take her all over again. You went back to the car, pulled it into the nearest alley, and cried until you threw up. She was your little girl, and now she was nobody's little girl, and now she was gone. You smoked a cigarette or half a dozen to calm your nerves, and then you sought the sanctuary of the stationhouse and tried to pretend that nothin' was missin' from your heart._

_If you thought it would make things easier on Donnie, it backfired. The mornin' salaams to the great god Bog stopped, but he just got more aloof than ever, and when he looked at you, the blankness that had replaced his adoration had in turn been supplanted by deep, sullen resentment. He was mad at you for takin' his sister, and you were too ashamed of not bein' there for him after she died to explain that you'd done it for him. So the gap between you got wider and wider, and then one day, he disappeared into it altogether._

Now here he was, calling him in the middle of the night and bringing back the voices of the dead. _Pop, I gotta talk to you. I need your help._

He glanced at the oversized numbers on the alarm clock beside the bed. Two A.M. "Don, what's goin' on? It's ass o'clock over here."

"I know, Pop, I know." Agitated and slurred, as if he were on the bare edge of a drunk. "Look, I'm sorry, but I didn't know who else to call."

He threw back the covers and swung his legs out of bed. "You all right? Somethin' happen on the job?" He was wide awake, and his mind was racing with unpleasant possibilities. Behind him, Ana stirred on her side of the bed, and the room was dimly illuminated by the bedside lamp.

"Don? Who is it? Is everything all right? Is it Donnie?" Waspish, and filled with worry for the child over whom she had so recently held vigil.

He flapped a silencing hand at her and shuffled into the bathroom, where he closed the door and locked it behind him. He sat on the toilet.

"No. I mean, yeah, but not like you're thinkin'. Aw, fuck."

"Don, slow down and talk to me. You're not makin' any fuckin' sense."

"I can't talk here, Pop. I'm outside the green lanterns."

Ah. "Outside the green lanterns" meant his boy was undercover. He shifted on the toilet. "Then why you even-?"

"It's about my girl. Pop, please."

"Listen to me now, and listen good. I want you to go to the drugstore and buy one'a them cheap, disposable cellphones. As soon as you get someplace safe, you call me. You lock yourself in the crapper somewhere and tell anybody with you you gotta take a really big shit. I'll be waitin'."

He hung up without waiting for an answer and left the bathroom. Ana was waiting for him, clutching impulsively at the neck of her nightgown. "What is it?" she demanded. "Is Donnie hurt?"

"Naw, he ain't hurt. He's fine. He just needs a little advice, that's all." He scratched at the baggy seat of his boxers.

"At two in the morning?"

"'S about the job," he muttered vaguely. "Now go back to bed and turn out the light before you wake up Junior. Was hard enough getting him to sleep the first time."

He shambled past her through the living room and into the kitchen. He turned on the light without even thinking and went to the cabinet above the stove. He kept his booze and his cigarettes in it, and he suspected that he would need them both before he saw his bed again. Ana and his doctor were after him to give up both, but they could go hang. They didn't live inside his head, and in thirty years on the job, a drink and a good smoke had been the only things able to steady his nerves after a rough shift. Well, that and a good screw, but at his age, that was no longer a nightly engagement.

It was two hours before his son called again, and he had nearly nodded off into his ashtray when the phone rang.

"'Lo?" he grunted.

"It's me, Pop."

He rubbed his face with his hand. "'Course it's you. You gonna tell me the trouble you're in?"

"I'm not _in _trouble. Well-,"

"Don, goddammit, I'm not in the mood for fuckin' ring-around-the-goddamned-rosie," he barked.

"Couple' a weeks ago, the DA approaches me 'bout goin' undercover to bust a child pornography and sex-trade ring. Told me it was a two-day job, max, that I'd be home with Rebecca and my boy before I knew it. That was almost seven days ago, and then tonight, Rebecca sees me in the window of the restaurant with my partner."

"So?"

"We were playin' husband and wife."

"Ah." He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Listen, Don, I know it's rough, but if she's gonna be a cop's wife, she's gonna have to accept that you gotta do things like that now and again."

"I didn't tell her."

"Tell her what?' he asked, but comprehension dawned before Don could answer. "Ah. Shit."

"I know it was stupid, but I thought she had enough to worry about takin' care'a Junior, and 'sides, I figured I'd be home before it mattered."

"Your first mistake was believin' a single word that came outta that DA asshole's mouth," he grunted prosaically. He was about to tell him how heroically stupid it had been not to tell her about the assignment in the first place, but then a slap echoed in his ears, and he saw his son's head bounce off the passenger window with a dull thud. He closed his mouth. Finally, he said, "What d'you want me to do?"

"Talk to her, Pop, explain to her what's goin' on. Convince her to talk to my captain."

"What makes you think she's not just gonna slam the door in my face? Things between her an' me aren't as bad as between her and your ma, but somehow I doubt she'd be the first in line to nominate me for The Grand High Poobah of Upper Buttcrack."

"You got no reason to lie."

"'Cept for the fact that I'm your father."

Don's sardonic snort cut him to the quick, and he resisted the urge to break the connection and drink until the world blurred to nothingness and his mouth tasted of turpentine and sawdust.

_What'd you expect him to say? Did you think he'd fall all over himself with gratitude just because you acknowledged paternity? Truth is, you haven't been a real father to him since Diana died, and the last good time you ever had with him was when you took him to a Yankees game after school when he was ten. Even that wasn't perfect 'cause you left Diana behind, and Ana told you while you were getting ready for bed that night that she'd been crushed by the exclusion. No Father of the Year there. Your son hates your guts, so don't expect him to get all dewy-eyed at one clumsy gesture in fifteen years._

"Pop, I'm askin' you to try. I can only imagine what's goin' through her head, but I can't lose her or Junior. I can't. Not to this job. If you won't tell her, I'll walk on the assignment and tell her myself."

"You can't. You walk, and you'll get you and your partner killed."

"Fuck Delgado, and without Rebecca and Junior, I don't have anything to live for anyway."

You wouldn't," his mouth said, but his heart knew he would.

_He adored Rebecca. You saw that the minute he brought her home. He carried her up the steps and over the threshold like it was the most natural thing in the world, and then he went back for her chair as if it was nothin' more important than a handbag. He was smilin' and laughin' the whole time he settled her into it, and you could see that it was old hat to both of them, simply a part of their routine._

_You were surprised at the girl who had captured his heart. You expected that the woman who would eventually take his name would be feisty and no-nonsense, not meek and quiet and delicate. The chair shocked you; of course it did. Don had talked his girl to the moon in the week before the visit, but in all the details he'd provided about the future Mrs. Flack, he'd never mentioned her handicap. Just how smart and determined and sweet she was, and all her degrees and accomplishments. He'd made her out to be a goddess, and you were startled to see the diminutive waif she'd turned out to be. Still, you knew your boy was a good judge of character for the most part, so you were willin' to reserve judgment._

_Ana, on the other hand, was devastated. Oh, she tried to hide her disappointment behind polite, strained smiles and stilted conversation, but she wasn't foolin' anyone, least of all Rebecca, who bore the scathing tines of maternal disappointment with stoic dignity. From the moment Don had called to say he was bringin' someone special home, she had been in an ecstasy of anticipation, and she'd fluttered around the house, talkin' about weddin' plans and grandbabies. She'd been after Don to settle down since the day he graduated the academy, and now five years behind schedule, he was finally lookin' to start a family. And then she'd taken one dismayed look at Rebecca, and all her dreams had died. Surely nothing that fragile could create and sustain life. _

_You knew Rebecca registered the subconscious insults and questioning of her worth because you saw her knuckles tighten, but she never lost her head, never gave in to the childish, petty insults that surely tickled the backs of her teeth. She just kept her head up and answered the questions as best she could and evaded the rudest queries with a timely sip of coffee._

_Regardless of what you or Ana thought, he married his girl at St. Patrick's, young and handsome in his blues. He was as proud of her as any groom on his weddin' day, and he treated her like Cinderella while he spun her around the dance floor at the reception. It shoulda been clumsy, their dancin', but it was smooth and fluid in spite of her feet bein' Velcroed to his, and you thought that it was just another proof of the secret lovers' world they shared. _

_You finally realized what he saw in her after that bastard psycho had laid his guts open and landed him in the ICU. She was obviously stunned and wracked with grief, but she was also ready to tangle with pushy doctors and insensitive nurses. There was deceptive strength beneath the weakness of her body, and she was his fiercest advocate when he couldn't speak for himself._

_You still remember the precise moment when you knew your son had made the right choice in a wife. Some eager-beaver young administrator was askin' her if she wanted to donate Don's organs in the event that he never made it off the table. She looked at his earnest face and then at the sheaf of tidy, white papers on his clipboard._

May I see those? _she asked, and you thought she was actually considerin' givin' your boy over to the body snatchers. She paged through the forms, lips pursed in concentration. When she looked up, her smile was feral. _My husband has been on the table for an hour, and you're coming to me, asking permission to pick his bones while he's still alive?

_The compassionate smile on the face of the administrator faltered. _Ma'am, I can assure you that the outstanding surgeons here at Trinity are doing everything in their power to ensure that your husband makes a full recovery. These papers are simply a way of ensuring that if the unthinkable should happen, he'll leave a legacy of honor. As a police officer, your husband devotes his life to saving others. Wouldn't it be fitting if-?

Shut up, you supercilious toerag, _she snapped. _Don't you dare give me that tired spiel about doing my final duty by my husband. Don't trot out hollow-eyed waifs whose lives could be saved if only I would set aside my grief and sell his kidneys and his eyes and his lungs like they were fucking giblets. My husband has paid his debt to New York over and over and over again in ways you cannot possibly imagine, and when he gets up out of that hospital bed, he will do it again. That's the kind of man he is, and I love him for it, but that doesn't mean I like it. _The administrator was staring at her in rapidly deepening alarm._

_Her voice was soft as she continued. It was mournful, but there was also a bitter satisfaction in it that raised the hackles on your arms. _I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I am not a good woman. Not by any stretch of your fervid imagination. I don't care about the hollow-eyed children with kidneys gone septic inside their bodies or fathers who could study the faces of their children if they only had new corneas. The only life I care about is the one in OR 6, and if that one is snuffed out, I won't use its embers to rekindle flagging souls. That life is mine. He entrusted it to me, and I'll be damned if I'll dole it out like candy to ignorant bastards who won't give a flying fuck about the man who gave it to them.

So, you take these forms and get out of here, and if you even think about coming in here with a DNR or any other bits of backdoor paperwork, you'll be picking this clipboard out of your teeth. _She tossed the clipboard at him and sat back in her chair, face inscrutable as fog. The administrator left and did not return, and you put paid to any questions of what Don saw in her._

_You saw other glimpses of what had drawn him to her in the days after his surgery. You only visited twice after he came out of his coma-it broke your heart to see him in so much pain, and you got the distinct impression that he didn't want you there-but you saw enough. The same hands that were so stiff and clumsy as they'd struggled to hold forks and champagne flutes at the weddin' reception were gentle and soft with him. They caressed his bloodless face and rubbed his hands, and when the pain gripped him, they hovered over his wounds and murmured words of comfort. You never understood what she whispered into his ear-it sounded like gibberish-but his face would relax, and his breath would come a little easier, and he could sleep. After seein' her with him in the hospital, you had no doubt that she was in it for the long haul._

_It took Ana a little longer to come around, but she finally did when Junior was born. When Don called from St. Vincent's Maternity Pavilion in late July and told you to bring his mother and come right away, you had no idea what the fuck was goin' on, but then you walked into the room, and there was Rebecca, propped in a bed, and Don, holdin' a squirmin' blue bundle._

Ain't he beautiful, Ma? _he said, and pulled back the blanket to expose that solemn, wrinkled face. _He's perfect, Ma. My boy.

_He coulda knocked you both over with a feather. You never even knew she was pregnant, and you thought he might be jokin', but then you got closer and saw the tiny anklet that said, _Flack, Don III, _and the blue eyes that have been passed to every Flack child in memory. And the way he was holdin' him, like he was more precious than air. You'd held him and his sister that way a lifetime ago. That was his son, and your boy was a proud papa._

_Ana forgave Rebecca everything the instant Don placed Junior in her arms. She finally got it through her head that Rebecca was just tryin' to be good for her son, just like any other girl he mighta married. Her handicap didn't make her any less capable of lovin' Don for who he was, and she was just like any other new mama when the baby started fussin'. She reached for him and inspected him, and when she figured out he was hungry, she popped him onto the breast just as neat as you please. And Don just beamed about it all, one hand supporting his son's rump._

_He got it right. He learned to put his family before the badge, and he's happier in his marriage than you ever were in yours. So you're damn right he'll walk if it's a choice between his family and his badge._

"Listen, I'm gonna go talk to her, all right? I'll tell her what you told me and see if I can't convince her to at least talk to your captain or the DA to confirm your story. Then I'm gonna give her the number to your disposable cell. That's all I can do. I can't make her talk if she don't wanna, and I'm too damn old to go strongarmin'."

"All right, Pop." He sighed. "Thanks."

"I-," _It's gonna be all right, son. _That's what he wanted to say to the son he had failed so many times, but thirteen years out of the uniform, and the cop was still too strong. "I'm leavin' right now," he finished instead, and hung up.

He snubbed out his cigarette, took one last swig of bourbon, and stood. If he was going to be thrust into the role of white knight, he'd better look the part. He shuffled out of the kitchen and went in search of his razor, some mouthwash, and his dress blues.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

He hadn't slept the night before, and so when Delgado tossed the takeout box with the cold empanada in front of him, his stomach rolled, and he pushed it away from him. Besides, after last night, he couldn't be sure she hadn't poisoned it. "No, thanks," he muttered, and rubbed his too-dry eyes.

Delgado shrugged. "Suit yourself," she said, and took a hearty bite of her own empanada. "You know," she said as she sat down opposite him at the small, round table, "whatever is eatin' you, you gotta let it go."

"Thanks for the advice."

"Jesus Christ, Flack. You think you're the only cop who's ever lost a family to the job?"

"Naw, I don't," he snapped. "The point is, I wanna be one of the few that doesn't. I don't want my son growin' up thinkin' of me as that bastard who made his mother cry."

_Like Gavin's bastard kid probably did, _whispered a malicious voice inside his head. _Or like you did. You loved your father as a kid, but there was no denyin' he was a bastard who made your mother cry. Your sister, too. The proof was in their red-rimmed eyes as they washed dishes or colored pictures on the livin' room floor. It was the stain of This Job is More Important Than You, and it wore them down, made them dull. You saw what it did to them, and you swore that when you had a family of your own, you'd never do that to them, never disappoint them like that._

_But you did, and long before now. Rebecca's spent more than one birthday alone, and on your third weddin' anniversary, the Rangers tickets she paid an arm and a leg for went unused because you were interrogatin' a child-rapin' murderer. By the time you got home, your anniversary and the game were long over. She tried to tell you it was all right, that there would be other chances, but you know it hurt her because you saw it in her eyes as the hairbrush she was holdin' tried to comb the pain away. You know she learned her lesson, too, because she never tried for such a personal, thoughtful gift again. Now it's socks and ties and shirts, maybe a watch. Nice and safe. Why should she bother puttin' her heart into anything when it's gonna wind up with a six-digit badge number tattooed into it?_

_How long before your son learns that lesson, too, just like you did? Maybe it'll be at his first birthday party. Right about the time he's shampooin' with his cake, you'll get called out to investigate a bloater in the East River. If you're lucky and Rebecca is merciful, she'll only put the snapshots with you in 'em in the photo album so Junior won't know that some dead skeeve was more important than him._

_Rebecca won't be able to cover for you by the time he's five, though, even if she wanted to. He'll be old enough to notice that you're not at his kindergarten recital, where he's onstage dressed as a stalk of celery in honor of nutrition. He'll come off stage cryin', and it won't be you who has to clean up the mess. Nope. It'll fall to Rebecca to explain why your seat is empty without admittin' that somebody else's son mattered more than your own. Don't worry, though. By the time he's nine, it won't hurt anymore when you don't show up because he'll have learned just to pretend you're dead._

That was assuming he was even still in his son's life by then. He'd been waiting all night and through the morning for his disposable cell to vibrate, but it never had. It had just been a dead weight in his sock, and now he was beginning to wonder if his old man had even bothered to talk to Rebecca. For all he knew, his father had just hung up the phone, smoked a cigarette, and gone back to bed, and Rebecca and Junior were long gone.

He wondered where she might have gone. There was beyond the wall in Grand Central, of course, but he doubted that was her first choice. It was too close to the site of his betrayal, and there was always the risk that their paths would cross again. There was Florida, too, Whiting's Glen or St. Augustine or Tallahassee. If she stayed on the right side of magic, he might be able to track her to one of the universities, but if she'd decided that what she thought he'd done had voided all their promises, he was screwed. He knew jack shit about the magical enclaves scattered around the country, and that was his fault. She'd volunteered to tell him whatever he wanted to know about the Wizarding world, but he hadn't wanted to know. The more he knew, the more real it would be, and the greater the possibility that his Junior would leave him for it someday. So, he hadn't asked, and now he was paying for it.

The worst-case scenario was that she'd packed up and taken him to Scotland, back to the school where she'd been forged into the woman he'd married. Scotland might as well be the moon as far as visitation was concerned, assuming he ever got any to begin with. Even if she consented to it, he couldn't just hop a plane to Scotland twice a month. He'd be lucky to make it twice a year.

_That's no way to be a father. That's a damn sperm donor with namin' rights. You swore to yourself that if you ever had kids, you were gonna be a responsible father and a hands-on dad. You were gonna love 'em and protect 'em and teach 'em right from wrong, and you were gonna be around for the fun stuff, too, like their first words and first steps. You were gonna watch mind-numbin' hours of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues and give 'em piggyback rides into the kitchen to see their ma._

_If she takes him to Scotland-or anywhere else on that side of the barrier-none of that's gonna happen. You'll get a snapshot and a couple'a letters a year and maybe a phone call from a voice you won't recognize, one with England in his mouth instead of New York. He'll dutifully tell you about his friends and his schoolwork, and maybe he'll even tell you about the new guy who's bonin' your girl._

An image of Rebecca in someone else's arms danced before his eyes, and his stomach cramped. He saw her in all her glory, pale and naked and writhing underneath another man while his son slept in an adjacent room. He imagined her telling this phantom stranger that she loved him, that it felt so good, that he was her Prince Charming. And he imagined his son calling him _Daddy._

"I gotta-I gotta go," he said abruptly, and stood.

"Not again," Delgado said, and rolled her eyes.

"Hey, fuck you, Delgado," he snarled, and reached for his leather overcoat.

He had one arm inside the jacket when the phone vibrated. He was so startled that he jumped. He bent down to retrieve the phone from his sock and stepped on the overcoat. His feet tangled in one another as he tried to step off, and he staggered backward and fell onto the bed with an ungainly flop, telephone clutched in one hand.

"Fuck," he swore, and flipped open the receiver. "Pop?" he shouted breathlessly into the receiver. "Pop, did you talk to my girl? Was she still there? Did you convince her to talk to my captain?"

"Yes, he did," came the soft reply, and he was helpless to stop the rush of breath that escaped him.

"Rebecca? Oh, my God, doll. It's not what you think. What you saw. I can only imagine what you're thinkin', but I swear. I swear on Junior it wasn't that. It was just work, doll. That's all. I would never-," He was babbling, but he didn't care. As long as she was on the phone, she wasn't gone.

"Hey," she said, and when he continued to babble, "Don!"

He stopped, heart in his throat and fingers slick and tight around the cheap plastic of the receiver.

"Your father came by last night and explained everything. At least, I think he did. My New York is usually good, but I'm not so fluent in Sleepy Old Bastard."

Relief made him giddy, and he tittered. "So-so you know that I never-that it was just-?"

"Why didn't you tell me, Don?" she snapped. "If you had just told me what you were doing, I could've sucked it up. Instead, I-," She suddenly sounded brittle and on the verge of tears.

_If you'd told her, she wouldn'ta had to spend most of the night thinkin' you were fuckin' somebody else and laughin' at her behind her back, _his father supplied helpfully.

His relief dissolved in a wave of hot shame. "I know I shoulda," he said quietly. "I know. I just thought it would be better if you didn't have more to worry about on top of takin' care of Junior. 'Sides, the DA swore it was only a two-day job."

"Well, an Arithmancer _he _ain't," she said primly, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek to quash a bray of laughter.

"I love you, Rebecca," he blurted, and suddenly, his heart was pounding inside his chest.

_Say you still love me. Say we can fix this. Say you'll still be there when I come home, that I'm still gonna get to bundle up Junior for his first trip into the snow, that we're still gonna go to Central Park so that I can take you ice-skatin' with me. Tell me that I'm still gonna taste snow on your mouth, and the February 2nd is still the best day of your life._

"I love you, too, Don Flack, but make no mistake. I will not be your fool, so if you want out, you tell me right now."

He rose from the bed and went into the bathroom, away from Delgado, who had been listening to his end of the conversation with undisguised interest. He shut the door and sat on the toilet. "The only thing I want is to come home to you and Junior."

"Did you fuck her?" Crude and unflinching.

"No," he answered without hesitation.

"Did she see your lovers' triangle?"

_Lovers' triangle_ was Rebecca's name for the triangle created by his bellybutton and the spars of his hipbones. She said it was a place more intimate that his cock and balls because it was usually seen only by lovers and doctors.

_Doctors sure as hell saw yours, didn't they? A whole team of them. And nurses. And fuckin' Mac, of all people. For a while there, it was on display for anyone who wanted a goddamn gander. They invaded her sacred space, and once you were out of the hospital and healed up enough to stand it, she devoted a lot of time to reclaiming it. That first night you were together after the explosion, she was almost more interested in it than in your dick. She constantly returned to it with her hands and her mouth and tongue. Not that you minded. The soft, wet blade of her tongue on the hard, rigid flesh of your scar was exquisite and left you a shuddering wreck even before her fingers curled around your strainin' prick._

_And then there was that time the Christmas after the bombin', long after you thought her cryin' was finished. What had started as a backrub was rapidly escalatin' into somethin' decidedly more lewd under the old mistletoe. She was mouthin' the Triangle, hot and frantic and oh-so-good. You kept waitin' for her to go lower and make your bells jingle, but she never did. She just kept nipping and kissing and laving her way over your skin._

Mine, _she whispered feverishly. _Mine. Mine. _When you lifted the hair that had fallen in front of her face, you realized that she was cryin'._

_That killed your hard-on in a hurry, and you gathered her up. _Rebecca, what's wrong?

_She dissolved into hard tears then, the kind you hadn't heard since you came home to find her in the shards of broken dishes, and the only word she'd say was _mine. _You could only hold her and rock and wait for it to subside._

Yeah, doll, _you told her. _It's yours. Nobody's but yours. I swear. Ssssh.

_That was the true end of her mournin' what Lessing did to you. Oh, she still has plenty to say when the rumors of another appeal start swirlin', but they're not broken, her words. They're strong and clear and full of dignity, and the hysteria and confusion that used to scour your heart is gone. She picked herself up and got back in the game after that inexplicable night of worship and purging at the Triangle, and you've never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth._

"No, doll. She didn't. Nobody but you has since the night we met. I told you it was yours that night under the Christmas tree, remember? And I meant it."

"I want to put my mouth there," she said quietly, and the aching longing made his mouth go dry.

"And I want you to," he answered. He was wryly amused to hear his voice emerge in a rasp.

"Do you?"

"Yes. God, yes." He closed his eyes and imagined her doing just that, naked and wanton and reverent as her lips wrote hosanna over his shivering, eager skin. His throat was a pinhole, and his balls were suddenly heavy inside his boxers.

_You better open your eyes before Delgado kicks in the door and finds you playin' trouser trumpet, _his father suggested, and his eyes flew open. He double-checked the door to make sure it was locked.

"You, uh, you doin' okay?" he asked.

"Better than last night. I think the DA thought I was some crazy woman off the street when I went to see him this morning."

"You talked to the DA?"

"Well, yelled would be a more accurate word," she conceded. "Your father said I should."

"I'm so sorry about alla this," he said. "I didn't mean to leave you and Junior alone so long. I-they just showed me those pictures, and I had to take it."

"I know, babe."

"Hey, is Junior okay? I didn't see him with you last night."

"That's because he was with your mother. She wanted some time with her 'precious grandbaby', and I thought I could do some shopping. I picked him up after my holy crusade to the DA's office."

"So he's good?"

"Someone wants to say hello," she said, and a moment later, the unmistakable sound of Junior gurgling came through the receiver. In the background, he heard Rebecca say, "Say hi to Daddy."

His chest constricted, and he closed his eyes against the sudden scald of tears. "Hey, buddy," he managed. It's your old man. You takin' care of your ma?"

Junior squealed.

"Daddy loves you, Junior. He misses you, but I'm gonna be home real soon. Daddy loves you."

Rebecca's voice, distant and amused. "Junior, _no. _Don't put that in your mouth. You don't know where that's been. That's nasty." Junior's gurgles receded, and Rebecca returned to the line. "He's definitely your son. He was mouthing the phone."

"Give him a kiss for me?"

"I will."

"So…we okay now, you and me?" Shy.

There was a long silence. "I'm still pissed at you for letting me think that you were fuc-that I-that you-," She stopped, and he could hear her struggling for composure. Finally, she said, "We still need to talk, but it's nothing that can't be fixed. Junior and I'll be waiting when the chase is over."

"Yeah?" He felt light-headed.

"I love you. You just do what you need to do and come home. The bed's too empty without you." She was crying now. He could hear the soft, sad intakes of breath.

_Oh, my girl, _he thought. _I'm so sorry for bein' my father's son._

"I'm comin' home soon, doll, and there's never gonna be another undercover assignment. I love you, you hear? Don't you ever forget that."

"Okay." Thick and muffled. "I have to clean the Junior slobber off the phone. Be safe out there, my love."

_My love. _The endearment pierced his heart even as it skipped a beat. In a moment of panic, he began to sing. "I guess you'll say, what can make me feel this way? My girl." It was stupid and juvenile and off-key, but it coaxed wobbly laughter from her, and it was enough. He blew her a kiss and hung up.

As soon as this was over, he owed his father a beer or ten and his wife and son a lifetime of tenderness, but right now, he had a dirtbag to catch. He slipped the phone into his sock and opened the bathroom door.

"Hey, Delgado, I got dibs on that damn empanada. I'm starvin'."


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

Charlie Eppes and Cal-Sci appear on _Numb3rs_ and are the property of Cheryl Heuton, Nicholas Falacci, Jerry Bruckheimer, and CBS. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **The end. No more. There will be no direct sequels, but there are other stories in the continuity. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read.

Don Flack had envisaged many scenarios for his homecoming. He had imagined the Conquering Hero routine, with Rebecca meeting him joyfully at the door with hugs and kisses and Junior on her lap. He'd imagined a quiet night with dinner and diapers and love under cover after Junior was asleep.

He'd also entertained the possibility at the other end of the spectrum. He'd pictured coming home to an empty apartment, the walls stripped bare of pictures and only outlines on the floor where the furniture had been. Just like the crime scene photos he flipped through every day. He'd wander into Junior's room on numb legs to find his crib and all the sweet-smelling nostrums of infancy gone. Maybe the mobile would be left, the one that played "Hush Little Baby" in rhythm to soothing lights, and he'd watch it hover dreamily over the place where dreams had once lived. Then he'd shuffle into the kitchen and find a note taped to the refrigerator door, and it would read simply, _Too gone for too long. _Rebecca-speak for The End.

Neither of those scenarios greeted him as he slid his key in the door six days after their conversation in a cheap motel bathroom. Instead, he heard Rebecca's voice from behind the door.

"Oh," it said. "Well, I don't think a wipe is going to clean _that _up."

When he pushed open the door, he was confronted by the sight of Rebecca holding Junior's feet up to expose a filthy bottom, her mouth puckered in a moue of dismay. Underneath him on the couch was a much-abused diaper. Rebecca looked up at the sound of his grand entrance.

"Welcome home," she said, and gestured like Vanna White at Junior's dirty, bare ass.

It was so surreal that the power of speech momentarily deserted him, and he could only stand there with his arms full of his overcoat and bags from the Chinese place down the block. He blinked at his wife, who was still holding Junior's feet in the air like he was a young turkey ready for dressing, and then let his gaze drift to the poop-smeared buttocks the position revealed. Junior, unperturbed by the indignity, sedately gummed one chubby fist.

He started to laugh, softly at first, but soon he was howling, head thrown back and throat open wide to gulp air that was immediately expelled again in a stuttering guffaw that erupted from his belly. He scissored into the kitchen on unsteady legs and set the bag of food on the counter before it slipped from his fingers. Another breath, another spate of laughter, and he had to hug the countertop to keep from crumpling into an undignified heap.

"I'm glad you're amused," Rebecca said peevishly, and through his tear-blurred vision, he could see her scowling.

"S-s-sorry, doll," he sputtered weakly, and wiped his streaming eyes with the back of his hand. "Diarrhea?" he asked when he had regained some semblance of composure.

"God, I hope not. His tummy doesn't seem to be bothering him. I think he just made a pig of himself. Apparently, he doesn't realize that there's always more where that came from. Give me a hand?"

"Sure, yeah. You wanna hold him while I grab his bath seat?"

"How about you hold him, and I'll get the bath seat? If I sit him on my lap, he'll get poop all over me."

He came out of the kitchen and relieved her of Junior's feet. "Hey, buddy. Am I glad to see you," he said, and bent to kiss the sole of one twitching foot. "'S been so long."

_Too long, _corrected Gavin. _Hell, one day-one hour-is too damn long. He's on your mind and in your heart every minute of every day. You think of him when you're strappin' your guns on every mornin' and when you're unloadin' the clip at night. You see his face every time you're cuffin' some young skel with zits on his face and track marks on his arms. Every time you arrest some junkie mother with bruises under her eyes and crabs in her cunt, you see Rebecca bearin' down with every ounce of strength left in her exhausted body to bring him into the world._

_Before he was born, you could go anywhere you pleased and stay there as long as you liked, but from the second he drew breath, you wanted to be wherever he was. The week Rebecca spent in St. Vincent's after he was born, you left him only long enough to take a leak. When the nurses advised you to get Rebecca up and movin', you put him in a swaddle sling and tucked him to your chest while you coaxed his achin' mama to totter a few steps down the hall._

_Goin' back to work was the hardest thing you ever had to do. He was seven days old, and you had to leave him and his sore mama alone with no one to protect 'em. You were a pissy bastard with everybody that first day back on the clock, even the nerds. Mac Muppeted up and hid in his office for most of the day. Stella told you where to cram it, and Danny avoided you like the plague after the first explosion. You didn't mean to sharpen your teeth on their unsuspectin' asses, but you were so afraid for your boy. You knew what was out there, waitin' to hurt him._

_You musta called home twenty times that first day, and it was all you could do not to leave your desk and rush home to check. You kept imaginin' her fallin' while tryin' to lift him outta his crib, or the creepy new tenant down the hall askin' to borrow a cup of sugar and then rapin' and murderin' her while Junior screamed in his crib. You've learned to let go of your paranoia for the most part, but you still call twice a day just to be sure._

_Thirteen days without holdin' him or feelin' his feet kneadin' your forearm while he fed was a slow torture. You'd wake up in the middle of the night in some roach motel and listen for the sound of him in his crib, but there was only the sound of Delgado snorin' or the chuff of the balky radiator. You wondered what he was doin' and if he even noticed your absence from his life. By the end, you hated the pervert mafioso more for takin' you away from your son than you did for what he and his cronies had done and were doin' to those anonymous kids in the pictures the DA showed you. That's why you wanted to take him down in the end, and that's why you did._

Not that it had made much difference. After all that surveillance and cloak-and-dagger bullshit, the kids in those photos were all dead or gone. After the Pervert incriminated himself on tape, Vice and SWAT had moved in. A raid on his warehouse produced four dead kids in various stages of decomp and several thousand videotapes. Vice and the Feds were still sorting through the titanic mountain of evidence, and God only knew how many children it represented. His stomach had turned over as he'd watched the EMTs roll the four small bodies to the waiting ambulances, and beneath the righteous anger at being bested had been a bitterer, more selfish thought: _I almost lost my family for nothin'. _

He'd been ashamed of the thought, but he couldn't dispel it. It had beaten like a pulsepoint behind his temples as he drove back to the precinct, and not even the scalding water of the stationhouse shower and three applications of Irish Spring could banish it. It wasn't a cop thought; it was a father-thought, and he was still startled by such a radical shift in his thinking.

_What finally knocked it loose was the realization that any one of those kids lyin' there coulda been Junior. All of 'em started out as a wrinkled little face in a snapshot hung in somebody's locker. You towel-dried your hair in the precinct locker room and trailed your damp fingertips over the picture of Junior stuck in the corner of your locker. You'd taken it while he was lyin' in his bassinet, and his feet were still smudged with ink from printin' him for his birth certificate. All those kids used to look like him, and now they were dead, and if the wind had been blowin' differently, Junior mighta been there, too._

"I missed you, buddy," he murmured quietly, and blew on his feet. Junior squealed.

"Please tell me he didn't just make another deposit," Rebecca called from the bathroom. He could hear her rummaging in the cabinet under the sink for the baby shampoo.

"Naw, he's good. We're just playin'."

"Thank God. Mind he doesn't piss in your face. That's a treat, let me tell you. He's got worse aim than you do."

"Hey, my aim is golden," he retorted.

"Well, something is golden, any road," she muttered, and he grinned like a fool.

"We don't have to listen to this," he told Junior, and scooped him off the couch, careful not to let his butt defile the fabric.

He carried him into the kitchen, and from behind him came the sussurating rush of Rebecca's wheels. He turned to see her balancing the bath seat on her lap. Every roll, she stopped to adjust the seat on her knees. It took her six rolls to gain the sink, and she set the seat on the counter with an accomplished plop.

"Listen to what?" she asked, and blew a strand of errant hair out of her face.

"You slanderin' my good name."

She snorted and began removing the shampoo and loofah from the plastic basin of the tub. "It's not slander if it's true."

He turned on the tap. Junior, sensing a game was afoot, began to squawk indignantly and lift his feet off the countertop. Don tested the water streaming from the spigot with his fingers.

"Hey, I didn't tell you to opt for explosive decompression," he told him, and sloshed water onto his backside. Junior bellowed in outrage.

"Oh, God," Rebecca said disconsolately. "I'm sorry. This isn't the homecoming I wanted to give you."

"Naw, it's good," he told her. "It's real good."

It _was _good. It was normal. It was changing diapers and talking to his wife and taking care of a family he'd been sure he'd lost. It was Chinese takeout and maybe feeding each other eggrolls in bed. It was listening to Rebecca sing Junior to sleep while he suckled, or singing him to sleep himself while Rebecca took ten minutes for a shower. It was everything he'd felt slipping through his fingers as he'd watched her roll down the street with a face blank as marble.

When the worst of the mess was gone, he lay Junior in the bath seat and strapped him in. The baby kicked furiously and shrieked at his sudden imprisonment.

"I need to talk to your ma for a minute," Don said implacably, and turned off the water.

Rebecca, who had thrust a sponge under the faucet, blinked in confusion. "Don?"

He plucked the wet sponge from her slack fingers and dropped it into the sink. Then he turned her chair to face him and dropped to his knees in front of it so that they were eye to eye. "C'mere," he said tenderly, and cupped her face in his hands. "I'm the one that should be apologizin' to you, plannin' a homecomin' for you with roses and diamonds. I'm sorry for what I put you through. I shoulda told you, but I'm not the brightest guy, you know? I just thought it be easier if you didn't know."

Her hands came up to cover his. "Why did you let me just walk away?" Hurt, bewilderment, and a terrible, lost innocence.

"Because I love you," he said simply. "If I left that table and that bastard made me, he coulda found out who you were, found out about Junior. If he was connected, he'd've come after you to hurt me. He'd've found you, and he'd've raped you and killed you in front of me, and after he'd blown my brains out, he'd've taken Junior and sold him into a life of fuckin' rich, horny perverts. I couldn't let that happen. So I watched you walk. But I swear-I swear to you that it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do." His voice was ragged, and his hands were trembling. "The only thing that even compares to it was when-,"

Oh, but that hurt to much, to dredge up the memory of clutching his dead sister against his chest, so he pushed it away and kissed her, coaxed her lips open with his tongue and breathed his remorse into her. He let his hands drift to her hair and gathered it in his hands. It was light and soft, gold and absolution.

"Rebecca," he murmured against her mouth. "When I married you, I married up. Don't you _know_ that?"

A shuddering breath escaped her. "You're so full of shit." Fragile and too high, but she finally returned his kiss, all lips and tongue and clashing, scraping teeth. Her cool hands cupped his burning cheeks, and she tasted of salt and toothpaste.

He wanted to pull her out of the chair, to pull down her sweatpants and hike up her blouse and leave his mark on her in saliva and sweat and come. He wanted to take her on the kitchen floor, her hot skin against the coolness of the floor tile, but Junior was still in his bath seat, and while he couldn't drown in it, he was just creative, determined, and developed enough to roll himself off the counter if they gave him enough time.

"We, uh, we better get Junior cleaned up before this goes any further," he managed between parting kisses.

A wicked smile curled in the corners of her mouth. "You're assuming I want it to go any further," she mused.

He shrugged and feigned nonchalance. "If you're not interested, fine by me."

"If you let me touch the Triangle, you can do whatever you want," she purred, and sucked his bottom lip between her teeth. "You can use the scarves, the cuffs. You can shackle my feet to the footboards and e-,"

"God, Rebecca, stop before all the blood rushes to parts unknown and I can't stand up," he pleaded unsteadily.

His febrile mind was busily conjuring the images her shameless lips had suggested, and he saw her, naked and splendid and spread before him, bound to the bedposts by silk scarves or the spare cuffs he kept in the closet. There hadn't been much time for sex since Junior, let alone wanton, kinky sex, and the picture his hormone-flooded brain presented to him as he knelt on the floor with his wife in his arms made him dizzy. He could mount her and ride while she twisted and bucked under his hips and the bedsprings railed against Mrs. Petrinski's hectoring, or he could slither between her open legs and coax forgiveness on the wet point of his tongue.

"It's too late for that, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"But we still have to get up, don't we?" Rueful.

"Yeah."

But still he lingered to kiss her and draw his thumbs along her jawline. She was soft and sweet and familiar under his mouth and hands.

"Okay. On three," she murmured. "One." A kiss. "Two." She cupped his nape. "Three." She ran her hand over his chest.

He got to his feet, but he could not bring himself to break the kiss. He sidled to the sink with his lips still pressed to hers. When he finally broke the kiss, Junior was none the worse for wear. In fact, he was staring at his parents with an avid, goggling expression. _Why, whatever are you doing, Father?_

Flack chuckled and restarted the tap. "Trust me, Junior. This'll be one of your favorite activities when you get older."

"Oh, yeah? Well, what's your favorite now?" Rebecca asked mildly, and began to soap a tiny foot.

Her lips were still plump from his kisses, and he was tempted to kiss her again. "Wouldn't you like to know?" he answered smugly, and waggled his eyebrows at her.

"Oh, I'm sure it has to do with keeping a firm grip on your pistol," she said breezily, and inspected between Junior's toes for dead skin.

_You remember the first bath? _his father grunted, and there was a fondness in the question that startled him. _He was three weeks old, and you were both scared to death. You handled him like he was blown glass, and every squeak or grunt was cause for close scrutiny, lest the water prove toxic to his fragile skin. Some part of you knew you were bein' ridiculous, but you were terrified of fuckin' it up, of blindin' him with the soap. He'd come to you with all his parts intact and in perfect workin' order, and you were desperate to keep 'em that way._

_You marveled at him, and so did Rebecca. Neither of you could believe you'd created such a perfect creature by goin' to bed. I mean, yeah, love was magical, and sex was fantastic, and you'd known about the birds and the bees since you were six, but you never thought it made somethin' like this, like Junior. It exhilarated you and scared the shit out of you at the same time to see your eyes lookin' outta that munchkin face, and to know that you were responsible for him for the next eighteen years._

_That first bath took forever 'cause you and Rebecca had to savor every part of him. It's a damn wonder he didn't catch pneumonia while you were watchin' the water bead on the ends of his fingers. You talked to him and each other in awed whispers, and when you poured the baby shampoo over his head, it felt like a sacrament, a holy rite in the kitchen sink._

_It still is, but it'll never be as powerful as it was that first bath. Familiarity hasn't bred contempt so much as contentment. You expect to see perfect limbs and a small, round head with what Rebecca calls baby-pattern baldness, so they no longer surprise you. It makes you sad to think that magic is already wearing thin, but that's what happens when a kid leaves Wonderland, isn't it?_

He was startled by a fine mist of water on his face.

"Penny for your thoughts, babe?" Rebecca asked. "You've been washing that same arm for three minutes."

He blinked. "Huh?" Oh, nothin'." He shook his head to clear it. "I was just thinkin'. About how fast he's growin'."

"We've still got plenty of time. Besides, if you've still got baby rabies, there's no law that says we can't have more."

"I do not have baby rabies," he countered indignantly. Then, "But you'd really have another kid? Go through all that again?"

She laughed. "Hopefully not until this one is out of diapers, but yeah. Why not?"

"It was hard on you," he said, but he was seized by the undignified urge to bounce on his toes.

_She still wants to build a family with me. Junior's gonna have a brother or a sister, maybe more than one, and we can still work on getting the dog and the house with the big backyard and the picket fence._

"It's hard on everybody, babe," she said placidly. "Besides, I wouldn't trade making babies for the world." She playfully swatted his ass. "So, what's in the bag?" She jerked her head in the direction of the bag of takeout he'd left on the counter.

"Shit." In all the commotion, he'd forgotten about it. "I brought home a bunch'a stuff from the Chinese place down the corner. Thought you might not wanna cook. It's sort of a peace offerin'. I mean, I know-,"

Her eyes lit up. "Sweet and sour shrimp?"

"And sweet and sour pork, wonton soup, eggrolls, Mongolian beef, fried rice, Mooshu pork-,"

"Don Flack, I love you."

Even though he knew it was the product of excited hyperbole, the declaration made his chest ache. "I love you, too," he said quietly.

Her face softened, and in the next moment, she was on her feet, clinging to his shoulder for balance. "I know you do," she said, and kissed him. Her free hand slipped around him for further support.

He had his son's soapy arm in one hand and his wife in the other, and it was perfect. He was precisely where he was supposed to be, and dead children who might have had his baby's face were long ago and far away. He breathed in and smelled toothpaste and baby shampoo and Rebecca's clean skin, and it was heaven. He moved closer, not giving a damn if she felt the insistent, hard heat of his prick through the fabric of his pants.

"You want to finish up here, and I'll go dispose of the Junior's diaper before it seeps into the fabric of the couch and renders the living room unfit for human habitation?" she said when they parted.

"Absolutely." He pressed a kiss to her forehead and helped her settle into her chair again.

One hour after that, Junior was asleep in his playpen, the couch was soaking in a liberal application of cleanser and Febreze, and he and Rebecca were sitting on the floor, backs propped against the couch and ankles crossed in front of them. They were surrounded by takeout cartons, and Rebecca was prodding the shrimp in her sweet and sour shrimp with the tines of her fork. She speared one and brought it to her mouth.

"Damn, that's good," she declared, and chewed with obvious relish.

Chopstick-deep in his Mooshu pork, he had to agree. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until he'd started to eat. He swallowed his bite and immediately fished for another. "Fantastic," he agreed thickly. "Fried rice?" He held out the appropriate box.

She plucked it from his hand. "Thanks." She took a bite, chewed, and said, "Tell me something?"

"Anything."

"What do you mean, 'you married up'"?

He snorted and wiped the corner of his mouth with a crumpled napkin. "You gotta be kiddin' me. I mean, look at you. You're a brilliant, confident, gorgeous woman, and I went to a college where you could major in ass-wipin'. What've I got to offer you?" _Besides too many hours alone and a broken heart?_

"What've you got-," she repeated incredulously, and dropped her fork into the box of fried rice. "_You've _got to be kidding _me. _You gave me all of this." She gestured at the cluttered living room with newspapers on the coffee table and a breast pump perched atop the TV like an alien antenna. "I never thought I was gonna have any of this-a husband, a child. I thought I'd end up a spinster teacher with too many cats and no one to care when I died. I hit the goddamned lottery when I found you."

"But your math-,"

"Math waits forever. Besides, who's to say I'm not still working on it? I have notebooks of calculations in my night-table drawer. I work on them when Junior naps. Sometimes it's only twenty minutes, but it's twenty minutes. Krantz-you remember my Department Chair?-is still holdin' my job. In fact, she offered to extend my paid leave until the spring semester in January."

"Yeah? That's fantastic."

"Mmm. And Charlie Eppes from Cal-Sci wants to collaborate on a paper on Applied Probability and Quantum Mechanics for _The Journal of Cosmology and Modern Mathematics. _It could land us both a fat research grant."

He had no idea what quantum mechanics were, but it sounded wonderful. His wife was still working in the field she loved, still thriving, as a matter of fact. He had thought when he'd rolled her whiteboard out of the room in favor of Junior's changing table that he was robbing her of that identity, consigning it to the storage unit along with her desk and her markers, where it would gather dust and be remembered with a distant, aching fondness.

_You underestimated your girl, didn't you? _Moran sounded amused. _You shoulda known better. She's resourceful and determined, and when she wants somethin' bad enough, she claws her way to it. She told you once that folks at that school in Scotland likened her to a mongoose, and right now, you're thinkin' that was pretty damn apt._

"And I've got some other prospects going," she went on. "If the collaboration gains acceptance in the field, it could net a lecture circuit. Some of those land ten thousand a pop. A nice chunk of change for Junior's college fund or a down payment on a brownstone or house."

"That's even fuckin' better," he said emphatically.

"You didn't really think I'd given up the numbers, did you?"

He suddenly felt very arrogant and stupid. He blushed. "Well, I just-,"

"The only thing you ever did for me was make all my dreams come true. Isn't that what a prince is supposed to do?"

He opened his mouth to reply, but could find no answer.

She interlaced her fingers with his and said, "Now pass the fortune cookies."

The next time she spoke, she was beneath him in their bed, eyes glazed and mouth working as he teased her swollen, leaking nipples with his tongue.

"He told me love was poison," she gasped, and ran her fingers through his hair.

"Who?" he murmured absently. He was intoxicated by the taste of her on his mouth and the damp heat radiating from between her legs.

"A professor I once had." She arched and moaned as his tongue traced his name over one breast.

"He was full of shit."

"No. No, I don't think he was. Not about that."

He raised his head to meet her gaze, and she mewled and shuddered as his prick nudged her wet folds. "No, Rebecca?" he whispered. "Then help me die. Help me die," he pleaded, and thrust into her.


End file.
